Nicky Spence and friends perfectly capture the urgency and thrill of the opening of On Wenlock Edge; with its varied and imaginatively chosen couplings, this is an album which every RVW aficionado will want to own.

To start with a digression, the composition of Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge (1906-1909) overlaps with that of A Sea Symphony (1903-1910). Although very different in scale, both works have inspired openings, conveying a sense of urgency, of having important things to say, right from the outset. The symphony opens with a powerful invocation to 'Behold, the sea itself'—never more thrillingly caught than in the Hyperion recording by Martyn Brabbins and his BBC Symphony forces on CDA68245; the song cycle with the windswept protagonist standing on the Shropshire hill in the middle of a gale: 'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble'.

This is not the first RVW cover for which we've used a painting by Sir George Clausen (1852-1944). (The cover art of Over hill, over dale (CDA66777, our collection of partsongs, folksongs and Shakespeare settings with Stephen Layton and the Holst Singers is especially lovely.) Best known for his landscapes and scenes of rural labour, Clausen's untitled study of trees captures something of the same call to the spirit of the woods which is shared by RVW's setting of Housman, as the protagonist imagines an inhabitant of Uricon (Uriconium, the Roman settlement in what is now Shropshire) experiencing the same 'gale of life' nearly two thousand years ago.

26 August 2022 marks the 64th anniversary of Vaughan Williams's death, but the year's main RVW event is, of course, the 150th of his birth. Hyperion has, we hope, done his legacy proud over the years and never more so than in these compelling accounts from Nicky Spence, Julius Drake and colleagues.