When Summer Comes Again

This is Simon Mayor and Hilary James’s lockdown album; with no concerts to play they turned to favourite songs and pieces, and wrote some new ones. Simon Mayor, mandolin virtuoso, brushed up his skills on the violin. ‘The Buttermere Waltz’, a mandolin favourite, appears here as a fiddle tune. It’s really good. ‘Sumer is Icumen In’ is the oldest example of polyphonic music. The manuscript, for six voices, written in the Wessex dialect of Middle English, dates from 1261. Mayor and James give it a more sophisticated arrangement, and follow it with their own song along similar lines, ‘When Summer Comes Again’, which is also pretty old – they first recorded it 30 years ago. ‘The Stick’ is a poem by Mayor; he picks up a stick on a walk; at the end he is about to cast his staff into the stream, but instead leaves it for another weary walker. With its full chime rhymes and alliteration (‘heron, hare’, ‘timid trout’) this has a Middle English vibe, too.

James sings the traditional songs ‘Jockey to the Fair’ and ‘Lovely Joan’. In the latter a man offers his gold ring (is he married?) to a young woman, for sex. She accepts, takes the ring – and, before anything happens, takes his horse, and rides off. This demands a rougher, more urgent rendition than it receives here. A highlight is Tchaikovsky's ‘Barcarole’, arranged for mandolin, mandola and mandocello. James also plays the vast mandobass, bigger than she is.