Â鶹ԼÅÄ

This week’s Classics with NOW piece is A Shropshire Lad,' Rhapsody for Orchestra’ by English composer George Butterworth. This recording was performed by Â鶹ԼÅÄ NOW on a previous Welsh tour, with conductor Jac van Steen.

Butterworth’s song-cycle A Shropshire Lad was inspired by the war poems of A. E. Housman, and composed between 1909 and 1911. The epilogue, ‘Rhapsody for Orchestra’ shows the influence of other composers such as Sibelius, Debussy and Butterworth’s friend, Vaughan Williams. The song-cycle is one of only a handful of Butterworth’s works that remain, as he destroyed many of his works in case he didn’t return from the First World War and have the chance to revise them. Soon after writing A Shropshire Lad, he died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Full of pastoral colours and bittersweet nostalgia, A Shropshire Lad ‘Rhapsody for Orchestra’ is a beautiful piece to round off the week.