• The lost-youth mood of AE Housman’s collection of poems A Shropshire Lad (1896) has proved an irresistible source for composers – George Butterworth, John Ireland, Lennox Berkeley among many. Best known is Vaughan Williams’s cycle of six, On Wenlock Edge (1909) for tenor, piano and string quartet. It gives the title to On Wenlock Edge & Other Songs, Nicky Spence’s superb Vaughan Williams disc (Hyperion), also featuring Four Hymns, The House of Life and three folk songs. He has excellent partners in the pianist Julius Drake, viola player Timothy Ridout and the Piatti Quartet. The Scottish tenor’s gift for combining pure tone with direct, daring expression makes this a covetable disc (even with so many available versions out there, including John Mark Ainsley’s, also on Hyperion). In Is My Team Ploughing?, hushed strings pulsating, Spence handles the leaps from pianissimo to full voice with absolute control. Bredon Hill conjures the hot stillness of a summer’s day, piano tolling and pealing as “distant bells”, the high strings suddenly transforming all to icy winter and sorrow: magically done by all, as is the whole disc.
• Brahms’s two string sextets, early works, are often performed by an existing quartet, plus two guests. This is the case in the Belcea Quartet’s exemplary new set (Alpha Classics), with Tabea Zimmermann (viola) and Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello). As a result we might think of these as works for a bumper string quartet: bigger sound, thicker textures. Call it an aural illusion if you like, but the moment you rethink it as three pairs – two violins, two viola, two cellos – the works take on new clarity and originality: in No 1, Op 18, the eerie second-movement variation in which violins and violas engage in a strange half-dance; in No 2, Op 36, the way the second viola at times hovers endlessly between two notes, acting not as padding but as vital pivot for those instruments above and below. Brahms struggled to create the sound he wanted, telling Clara Schumann that No 1 was rubbish, to be thrown away. Had he heard these terrific players, he might have thought differently.
• Catch up with This Cultural Life (BBC Sounds), in which the mezzo-soprano opera star Joyce DiDonato talks to John Wilson about her Irish-Catholic upbringing in Kansas and explains how she longed to sing backing vocals for Billy Joel.
