Let us garlands bring

Gerald Finzi’s 1942 song-cycle Let Us Garlands Bring takes on particular resonance when you consider its dedication to Ralph Vaughan Williams on his 70th birthday: here’s a younger composer paying tribute to a giant of English song, meditating on age, youth and the inexorable passing of time. Composed between 1929 and 1942, the five songs for baritone and piano are a carefully contrasted set of Shakespeare settings. The jester Feste’s “Come Away, Death” from Twelfth Night opens the cycle with a mournful elegy, whose solemn funeral march softens into something more lyrical. “Who is Sylvia?” from Two Gentlemen of Verona briskly wipes away any tears with a sprightly setting whose unexpected phrase-lengths wittily mirror the poet’s. The cycle’s emotional keystone, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from Cymbeline, broods on death in music whose steady tread and slow-rising melody speak louder than any impassioned outpouring. The mood then lightens with the final two songs—the strumming ballad “O Mistress Mine” (Twelfth Night), and the easy rhapsody of “It was a lover and his lass” (As You Like It).