Program Four traces the evolution of a uniquely British sound through songs by the once-hugely-popular Maude Valérie White, Liza Lehrmann, and Roger Quilter; tragic figures George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney; occult-obsessed Peter Warlock; BBC music director Arthur Bliss; Vaughan Williams’s woefully underrated students Elizabeth Maconchy and Ina Boyle; and scions of the next generation Benjamin Britten and Gerald Finzi, whose Shakespearean song cycle, Let Us Garlands Bring, was written as a gift to the older composer. Vaughan Williams himself is represented by settings of verse by poets including his second wife, Ursula.

Bard Music Festival