Moeran Sketches

Ernest John Moeran was born in London but grew up in Norfolk and had strong ties with Ireland. While still a student at the Royal College of Music he was inspired by a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody that seemed “to breathe the very spirit of the English countryside”, and was soon collecting folksongs for himself. Moeran’s transcriptions were taken from English and Irish traditional singers with both rural and seafaring backgrounds, rescuing music and words both entertainingly earthy and sublimely beautiful which would otherwise have died with the artists who performed them.

The four works offered here by the Piatti Quartet on its Rubicon label debut are all but unknown; even the Household Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, written during World War II for amateur performance, has been recorded only sparsely, and the String Quartet in E minor of Vaughan Williams Ina Boyle, having thus far been passed over in the general revival of music by women, here receives its world premiere.