Anybody interested in English song will know the Shropshire town of Ludlow as the place where “lads in their hundreds ... come in for the fair”, as they do in the famous setting of AE Housman’s poem by George Butterworth.
It’s a song whose jaunty rhythms camouflage a dreadful truth: that many of these lads are off to war and won’t come back, destined to die in the unfaded glory of their youth. And the degree to which the poet revels in their pending deaths (it’s tantamount to necrophilia) is a test of good taste in performances. A test that Roderick Williams, everybody’s favourite British baritone, passed unequivocally in a recital for this year’s Hampstead Arts Festival.
