At 70, this British composer is at the peak of his powers

writes Richard Whitehouse

Friday, August 8, 2025

That certain composers are hailed as such from the outset while others only gradually come to prominence is an observation not relevant to the present alone. Yet the belated emergence of Ian Venables as a master of English song is of particular interest – whether in terms of his revivifying of a tradition that might have become moribund, or his drawing attention to authors whose poetry has been overlooked or, moreover, taken for granted as regards musical setting. The outcome is a corpus of songs and song-cycles that is second to none among those for whom the English language is a source of never-ending but often unexpected possibilities.
Although he studied the piano and the organ as part of his secondary education and had worked as a choirmaster when barely out of his teens, it wasn’t until he was in his mid-twenties that Venables had composition lessons in earnest. Earliest pieces find him adept in instrumental media, notably the Op 1 Piano Sonata In Memoriam DSCH (1975, rev. 1980; hearing the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony in 1972 was a formative experience) with its powerfully inward finale. Piano collections include The Stourhead Follies (1985), which (with Op 1) has been recorded by Graham J Lloyd, while the Three Pieces for violin and piano (1986, recently recorded by Chu-Yu Yang and Eric McElroy on Somm, 6/25) have an expressive poise and rhythmic agility that has rightly ensured them a place among Venables’s most often performed works.
‘Remember This’ may well be thought to be one of the finest vocal works to have emerged so far in the 21st century
Songs with piano accompaniment made a tentative (quantitively rather than qualitatively) early appearance in his output, with Midnight Lamentation (1974) reflecting the strophic design of Harold Monro’s poem via a setting of cumulative intensity. Pain(1991) is a setting of Ivor Gurney’s sonnet, investing its ominous observations on war with a wrenching anguish clinched, if not allayed, by the tonal starkness at its close (both recorded by Kevin McLean-Mair and Graham J Lloyd, Enigma, 4/00). (Gurney has since become a preoccupation, with Venables having rescued several of his major orchestral and instrumental works from oblivion.)
Several other stand-alone songs preceded Venetian Songs (1994-95), a cycle significant in that it marks Venables’s first engagement with John Addington Symonds – 19th-century poet, literary critic and Renaissance scholar whose openness on sexual matters informs much of his creativity, as is affectingly conveyed in Venables’s final song, ‘Love’s Voice’. This was followed by a setting of At Malvern (1998), where Venables vividly underscores Symonds’s elision of serene evocation of landscape with canny take on Catullus’s existential impulses (this and Venetian Songs have been recorded by Andrew Kennedy and Iain Burnside on Naxos). A very different perspective is that conjured up by the words of Rennie Parker in the song Acton Burnell (1997). Named after her poem inspired by the place where the first English parliament was held in the 13th century, the song renders its environs from an ethereal remove. It is also notable for placing muted viola alongside voice and piano, thereby making for an interplay whose finesse recalls Brahms’s Gestillte Sehnsucht.
It was with Invite, to Eternity (1997) that Venables created his first undoubted masterpiece in the genre. Setting four poems by John Clare (pastoral meditations presciently informed by an industrial-era alienation), this song-cycle is for tenor and string quartet – a significant subgenre with indirect antecedents in Gurney and Vaughan Williams, but more so Schoeck and Van Dieren. Here the poem of that title becomes an equivocal intermezzo next to the insistent scherzo of ‘Evening Bells’, those two central songs framed by the fervent ‘Born upon an Angel’s Breast’ and plangent ‘I am’ unerringly conveying Clare grasping onto his last vestige of self. This cycle’s emotional trajectory may be compared to that of Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, but there is no transcendence or even resignation; rather, the music amplifies the poem’s negatory essence in a symbiotic fusion (recorded by Andrew Kennedy and the Dante Quartet on Signum, 10/10). Vaughan Williams’s early masterwork is more directly alluded to with the original version (for tenor and piano quintet) of Songs of Eternity and Sorrow (2003; recorded by Andrew Kennedy, the Dante Quartet and Simon Crawford-Phillips on Signum, 4/08), a cycle of four poems by AE Housman whose emotional emphasis falls on its opening setting of ‘Easter Hymn’.
The half-hour ‘cantata’ Remember This (2008-11, for soprano, tenor and piano quintet), which sets a poem by Andrew Motion, is strikingly innovative as regards its overall conception. Its intricate yet unforced alternation between aria and recitative ensures the methodical accumulation of emotion towards the climactic final section, ‘In the eyes of our minds’, which brings to a close what may well be thought to be one of the finest vocal works to have emerged so far in the 21st century.
Songs might currently be predominant in Venables’s output, but there is no lack of chamber works – among which, the Piano Quintet, Op 27 (1989-96), is the most substantial and certainly the best known. Its three movements are far from beholden to formal archetypes: witness the formal unpredictability of its first-movement Allegro ma non troppo, preceded by an opening Adagio espressivo whose acute pathos informs the robust energy of what ensues, then the Largo espressivo that takes in a capricious scherzo-like central phase without at all undermining its soulful discourse. Nor is the finale’s incisive animation resolved by its slow postlude, for all that a sense of this music having come affectingly full circle is undeniable. Less immediately approachable, though more subtle as to content, is the String Quartet, Op 32 (1997-98); recorded by the Dante Quartet). There are once again three movements, though here the opening Allegro con energia has an impetuousness maintained right through to its close, and the playful central Allegretto scherzando is a deft foil to the finale whose initial eloquence is purposefully alternated with more febrile material prior to an ending almost brutal in its decisiveness.
Choral music has enjoyed increasing prominence in the composer’s catalogue. Earlier pieces such as the anthem for choir and organ O sing aloud to God (1993; recorded by Gloucester Cathedral Choir on Somm) – its text drawn from Psalms 77, 81 and 105 – evince a natural feeling for the medium, but there was little else before the Requiem (2018-19), for choir and organ; orchestrated 2020), which at 40 minutes is Venables’s largest-scale work to date. Particularly in the version with orchestra, this can take its place within a lineage of essentially inward Requiems such as those by Fauré, Duruflé and Martin. Relatively modest in scale it might be, yet there is no lack of intensity in terms of its individual sections or its overall conception. The absence of the ‘Dies irae’ is more than compensated for by an unusually searching take on the Offertorium, followed by a relatively extended setting of the Libera me whose ambivalent emotion renders the ‘Lux aeterna’ more affirmative and thus more meaningful. There has been no lack of Requiem settings in recent decades, and that by Venables is surely among the most probing in terms of what this text might mean to us today.
This defining work in Venables’s output has been followed by several short anthems and motets, along with two works – one of them Hermes Trismegistus (2021), a setting of Henry Longfellow pointedly designated a ‘scena’ – that again place the viola in the context of voice and piano. Two further song-cycles duly partner the voice with piano quintet and string quartet respectively. Portraits of a Mind (2022); recorded by Alessandro Fisher, William Vann and the Navarra Quartet on Albion, 8/23) opens with a setting of George Meredith’s ‘The Lark Ascending’ which is very different from, though no less moving than, Vaughan Williams’s fabled response, while The Wreaths of Time (2024) sets an anthology of American poets in what might be deemed an indication of the regard with which this composer is held on the other side of the Atlantic.
Venables was the featured composer at this year’s Elgar Festival, which saw the premiere of the orchestral version of his song-cycle Out of the Shadows (2023), originally written for baritone and piano trio. It was given by the English SO with Kenneth Woods, whose 21st Century Symphony Project would surely be enhanced by Venables being commissioned to write for it a ‘vocal symphony’ that marries his innate feeling for song texts with the expansiveness of an orchestral setting. It would be a striking new departure for a composer who is now at the peak of his powers.

Recommended recordings

Elegy, Op 2. Piano Quintet, Op 27. Poem, Op 29. Soliloquy, Op 26. Three Pieces, Op 11
Mark Bebbington and Graham J Lloyd pfs Coull Quartet
Somm Céleste (5/11)
Chamber music features intermittently throughout Venables’s career, and this collection centres on the Piano Quintet, which is becoming securely established in the repertoire.

‘The Song of the Severn’
Roderick Williams bar Graham J Lloyd pf Carducci Quartet
Signum (A/15)
This vocal anthology includes two of Venables’s most immediately appealing song-cycles – the title-track (2012-13) and The Pine Boughs Past Music, Op 39 (2009) – alongside a representative selection of individual songs accompanied either by piano or by string quartet.

‘Love Lives beyond the Tomb: Songs and Song Cycles’
Mary Bevan sop Allan Clayton ten Graham J Lloyd pf Carducci Quartet
Signum (7/20)
The demands placed on the listener by both the song-cycles and the individual songs on this album are well rewarded by their depth of content (includes Remember This).

God be merciful, Op 51. Requiem, Op 48. Rhapsody, Op 25, ‘In Memoriam Herbert Howells’
Choir of Merton College, Oxford; Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia / Benjamin Nicholas org
Delphian (2/23)
This album includes the orchestral version of Venables’s Requiem, plus a piece for chorus (2020) and one for organ (1996, written in memory of Howells, whose music also features here).