Prima Facie Records

PFCD217 £12.50 (UK) / £17.50 (ROTW)

Song cycles by Gurney, Dodgson and Runswick

1. Spoken introduction by Alison Truefitt 1981  
2-6. Ivor Gurney 'Five Elizabethan Songs' David Owen Norris piano
7-10. Stephen Dodgson 'Gipsy Songs' Julia Rayson clarinet,  Allan Schiller piano
11-18. Daryl Runswick 'Smart Songs' Daryl Runswick piano (world premiere recordings)

Total Time: 52:10

Alison Truefitt (1942–2020) was touched by genius. During a life sadly curtailed by dementia she managed to cram in five different careers, in all of which she operated at the highest level. As a young woman leaving University, she became Education Correspondent at the London Evening Standard. This she abandoned in 1971 to found the White Lion Street Free School in London, which broke the mould of traditional education and influenced generations of theorists. Then she moved on to pursue a lifelong dream of being a professional musician, enrolling in her thirties at the royal Academy of Music and emerging a world-class singer, as you will hear on this album. And, entering her fifties, she combined two further parallel careers, saving the community shop in her local village in Wales (for which she was awarded an MBE) and fulfilling her potential as a writer of poems, stories and novels. 

The song cycles offered here show Truefitt at various stages of her singing life. The Gurney was recorded in 1981: here is a young voice, fresh and ingénue. The Dodgson cycle shows her at the height of her vocal powers, the instrument mature and golden. The Smart Songs – poems about the vagaries of being an old woman and a woman poet – were recorded when she was 70, tailored to Truefitt’s persona and to her voice as it was at that time, still wonderful with an undiminished interpretational genius.

Credits

Recorded and produced by Steve Plews
Produced by Daryl Runswick
Sound recovery and mastering by Phil Hardman
Executive producer Steve Plews

Alison Truefitt (1942–2020) was touched by genius. During a life sadly curtailed by dementia she managed to cram in five different careers, in all of which she operated at the highest level. As a young woman leaving University she became a journalist and quickly rose to the position of Education Correspondent at the London Evening Standard. This career she abandoned in 1971 to found, with Peter Newell, the White Lion Street Free School in London, which broke the mould of traditional education and influenced generations of theorists. Then she moved on to pursue her lifelong dream of being a professional musician: she enrolled in her thirties at the royal Academy of Music, emerging three years later as a world-class singer, as you will hear on this album. And, entering her fifties, she combined two further parallel careers, saving the community shop in her local village in Wales (for which she was awarded an MBE) and fulfilling her potential as a writer of poems, stories and novels, posthumously published by the Dal Segno Press. She was also a wonderful stepmother and an inspirational wife. (Would one write that last sentence about a man? well one should. This was a whole person.) 

Truefitt’s range of repertoire was large: her Queen of the Night was legendary, but so were her Fauré songs and her Wolf lieder. She was by no means a contemporary music specialist but she gave the second performance (after Dame Janet Baker) of Britten’s Phaedra and took part in a rare revival of Shostakovich’s The Nose. 

The song cycles offered here show Truefitt at various stages of her singing life. The Gurney songs were recorded in 1981 when she had been in the profession for only a couple of years. Here is a young voice, fresh and ingénue despite Alison being 38 already. The Dodgson cycle shows her only four years later in 1985, at the height of her vocal powers, the instrument mature and golden. And the Runswick, recorded in 2013 when she was 70, is a testament to an amazing technique, a still-wonderful voice and an undiminished interpretational genius. The Smart Songs – poems about the vagaries of being an old woman and a woman poet – were tailored specifically to Truefitt’s persona and to her voice as it was at that time. She nailed them.