RECORD OF THE MONTH (MODERN MUSIC) - CLASSIC FM MAGAZINE, March 2000

CLASSIC FM MAGAZINE:
"Fans who remember Michael Flanders and Donald Swann's immortal show At the Drop of a Hat will need no reminding of Swann's musical and pianistic gifts. These were the more remarkable for being so understated, as was required by Swann's role in the show - that of the put-upon straight man to Flanders' attention-hogging rogue. Since his death in 1994, Swann has been largely remembered for this and little else. The Isles of Greece widens the picture. Swann's lifelong passion for Greece began when he was posted there with an ambulance unit in 1944, and subsequently focused on the small Dodecanese island of Casos. Musically, the fruits of this cross-cultural love affair included Greek folk songs which Swann noted down. There were also his original settings of modern Greek poets, and the Casos Sonnets that Swann composed to his own words in 1986. All these feature in The Isles of Greece, with the Casos Sonnets in two performances. One is by Swann himself, recorded at home on a cassette tape as he sings and accompanies himself at the piano in his inimitable style - not quite over the top but nearly. The other, expertly arranged for chamber orchestra and conducted by John Jansson, is interleaved with the Greek folk-song settings. The three excellent singers are Lucinda Broadbridge, Juliet Alderdyce and Jeffrey Cresswell. The music itself combines an easygoing unpretentiousness with quiet and searching intelligence. There is real intensity as Lucinda Broadbridge strikingly conveys in the fourth of the Casos Sonnets. And the best of the Greek settings, such as Palamas's Anatolia, are bewitching."
Malcolm Hayes

BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY NEWSLETTER:
Donald Swann is best known as half of Flanders and Swann - a humorist singing (and speaking) partnership which continued until 1967. Before that many of their songs (celebrated in their review At The Drop of a Hat) became part of the British popular psyche of the 1950s and 1960s. Mud Mud Glorious Mud is the best known of their songs They are still regarded with great affection.

Donald Swann was on this evidence clearly a most accomplished and sensitive composer His music is unfailingly lyrical although his word-settings often seem disarmingly disconnected from the curve and fall of the words. This is part of his engaging magic which knows nothing of bombast or grandiloquence.

The disc (gratifyingly filled to overflowing) contains new recordings (circa 63 minutes) and a home tape recording of Swann accompanying himself at the piano in The Casos Sonnets (eight songs to words by Swann) The latter, which plays for 14:47, has been cleaned of hiss but there is a trace overload of the piano sound and the occasional waver or wobble.

This disc is essentially The Isles of Greece cycle (folksily orchestrated with a light hand by the conductor) with individual songs sung by one (occasionally more) of the three listed singers. The cycle comprises The Casos Sonnets (seven of the eight) interspersed with Swann's arrangements of Greek folk songs (the latter sung in Greek).

Nothing jars and Jansson's orchestrations contribute to a literature that spans the light/serious 'divide' in common with works such as Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne, Berio's Folksongs, Marek's song cycles and Sean Davey's Granuaile cycle.

Swann served in the Dodecanese isle of Casos from 1944-46 as a young relief worker with the Friends Ambulance Unit. While there he wrote down many of the folk songs he heard from the refugees in his care. The folk-songs dance, chime and serenade. The Favours makes a fine, slightly arch, novelty duet about a girl and her aspirant suitor. The songs breathe the air of the Mediterranean and some hint at further east e.g. in the sweet and pungent perfumes of Anatolia. The Women of Souli floats and dances in a heat-shimmer long baked into the glaring landscape. Militsa has a threatening railway beat like a superheated headache. Idle Tears glints and shivers with the harp and chants lovingly around David Roach's saxophone. The title song Isles of Greece ticks and spins with impressionistic 'vitality - a spidery web of magical clockwork

The singers seem excellent throughout and there is nothing of the suffocating operatic ambience. The orchestra (a string quartet, flute/piccolo, oboe/sax, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, percussion, piano, harp and bass) is used with great delicacy. This music has a nostalgic fragility which might otherwise be stifled.

It was an inspired decision to include Swann's home-spun tape recording which is never less than poetic. Swann's breathless sprechgesang and high notes that aspire (but don't actually achieve) are trademarks of an eccentric but touchingly loveable English creator.

The words of the folk songs, though sung in Greek, are given only in translation in the booklet which is a pity. The booklet is otherwise excellent although it does not give the composer's dates of birth and death. If you would like to sample a single track then go straight to the joyous dance that is The Isles of Greece (track 20). This is a very fine disc and well worth seeking out.
Rob Barnett

MUSICWEB:
Donald Swann (1923-94) is particularly remembered for his shows with Michael Flanders (At the Drop of a Hat, etc.) but his genius was many-sided and this CD will extend the knowledge of his music for many people.

Swann got to know the Greek islands at the end of the Second War, especially Casos in the Dodecanese. This was reflected in his music from time to time and this well recorded CD seeks to draw together Swann's Greek strands. Some of the tracks are arrangements of traditional songs, mostly sung in Greek; others are varied original settings by Swann of Greek poems, mostly sung in English, of which I particularly enjoyed the delicious Miranda, which often figured in At the Drop of a Hat, the charming dialogue The Favours and the stark The Isles of Greece.

The three singers, admirable in their clarity of diction and delivery, are all well suited to this repertoire and they are accompanied by a chamber orchestra, a solo soprano saxophone contributing some evocative moments. The arrangements, including the purely instrumental Casiot Journey are by Mr. Jansson, who also sets the folk song Militsa which Swann did not set but much enjoyed. Swann returned to Casos in 1986, wondering if the spell it cast would have dissipated (it hadn't); the eight Casos Sonnets represent his thoughts in words and music on that journey. All are here, sung by Swann himself to his piano accompaniment, as a bonus II-VII, which also finely sung by the three "modern" singers. Their idiom is often recitative-like but is nevertheless deeply felt. Divine Art's relatively small catalogue has afforded several items of unusual interest, many of them British. This is certainly one of them and I am happy to give it a warm recommendation.   (awarded 5 stars *****)
Phil Scowcroft

FANFARE:
In [the Casos Sonnets] the island is personified, and the eight sonnets constitute a questioning, probing and existential dialogue between the island and Swann. They are, collectively, the key to his whole experience and to the rest of the music on this release. I suggest that you turn first to the last eight tracks, where you can hear Swann himself recite his verses above his own piano accompaniment, captured in less-than-professional but highly serviceable sound. Swann does the same on track 1 (Casos Sonnet 1), but is there far better recorded and performs above a more sophisticated accompaniment provided by saxophonist Bill Skeat.

Donald Swann’s last Greek foray took place in 1993, the year before his death. He made very fine and harmonically adept piano settings of his collection of folk tunes, both found and created. John Jansson later selected and orchestrated this collection of Swann’s music, grouping it under the title The Isles of Greece. His orchestrations are resourceful, appropriately spare or sumptuous where needed.

Donald Swann was a serious composer, but one profoundly out of sync with the prevailing trends of his time. Given the achievements of Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez (let alone Arnold Schoenberg) – I say this as their still unabashed champion – this stuff is decidedly retrograde, tuneful music in an atonal and otherwise ever more complex world. Good music can sound good and still be good. It’s happened before!

Isms come and go. They are created by people for all kinds of reasons. In Swann’s deeply humanistic and utterly disarming music and poetry, he, in his unprepossessing way, tries to get at the reasons they are created in the first place. The result is a wonderful excursion – beautifully conducted, sung, and played – into forthrightly tonal music and poetry that are disarmingly direct and simplistic in the way that Whitman is simplistic.

There are a few minor flaws in this recording [refers to slight occasional indistinct stereophony tracks 1&2] . These are however minor quibbles put forth by an unrepentant audiophile about an otherwise technically impeccable offering. My main criticism of this release is that it has effectively wreaked havoc on my reviewing schedule. Each day I go down to my word processor, hell-bent on achieving my self-imposed quota, and each day I instead cue up this CD to hear just a few tracks, and find myself once again helplessly sitting there, mesmerised, until it’s over.
William Zagorski