Leonard Butler: Song of the Milkmaid

Phillip Sear plays the seventh and last piece from a 1921 suite - ’Midsummer Days’ - by the British composer Leonard Butler (1869-1943). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I know little about Leonard Butler except that he was born in Dorking (which is in the Surrey Hills), studied with Ebenezer Prout, later became a professor of piano at the Guildhall School in London, and died in St. Austell. He seems to have specialized in liturgical and organ music, but also wrote some picturesque piano suites - rather in the manner of Frederic Mullen and Percy Elliott. He had a real gift for short, lively, light pieces in particular. The inspiration for the suite (which is not identified in the score, but from which the title is taken) is the poem “Ballade (Double Refrain) Of Midsummer Days And Nights - To W. H“ by William Ernest Henley (1849 - 1903). Presumably, Butler’s target audience would have been familiar with the poem. My thumbnail shows a detail from Rubens’s ’Milkmaids with cattle in a landscape on the Farm at Laken’. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Played by Phillip Sear (Email: piano4@ WhatsApp: )