Through the Centuries: Songs of Madeleine Dring album review – puts paid to any idea that she was not a serious composer

(Chandos) Whately/Drake Kitty Whately and Julius Drake perform the fervent, fun and intoxicating works of a British musician whose fresh assessment is richly deservedBorn in 1923, Madeleine Dring studied at the Royal College of Music, where her teachers included Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. An unconventional career, including stints in theatre, pantomime and cabaret, was cut short by her death from a brain aneurysm at 53. Already considered a maverick, the fact that much of her music remained unpublished until the late 1990s threatened to condemn her to obscurity.Enter Kitty Whately and Julius Drake, whose wide-ranging survey puts paid to any idea that Dring was not a serious composer. Drawing on poets from Shakespeare and his Elizabethan colleagues to the composer’s contemporaries, Dring’s canny knack for word-setting proves as effective as her ability to find a distinctive new melody for an old chestnut such as It Was a Lover and His Lass. Continue reading...