Grainger - Folk Songs

The Guardian 80

Booth/Glynn
(Avie)

More than half a century after his death, Percy Grainger’s true stature as a composer remains hard to pin down. For all that his own music trampled across stylistic boundaries and cheerfully subverted the conventions and proprieties of concert music, and despite the highly original textural imagination it sometimes reveals, this utterly distinctive musical personality rarely seems to have produced any genuinely enduring pieces. The oddities of Grainger’s private life – his obsessively close relationship with his mother, life-long interest in flagellation, and insistence on running between the venues on his concert tours, among other things – have often been examined more closely than any of the music he composed.

What is uncontested, though, is the importance of the contribution the Australian-born Grainger made to the English folk-song revival while he was based in Britain between 1901 and 1914, and dividing his time between his career as a concert pianist and folk-song collecting. After making arrangements of the tunes he found in existing collections, he began making forays into the field himself – especially to Lincolnshire, where he discovered yet more material. He made a variety of arrangements of what he found, as well as inventing “folk tunes” of his own; Benjamin Britten, no mean folk-song arranger himself, was a huge admirer of what Grainger achieved.