Lads of Wamphray / Percy Grainger

Percy Grainger composed this march as a birthday gift for his mother in 1905, basing it on melodies and musical material from a Scottish "border ballad." The poem celebrates a bloody skirmish between two clans in 1593. In the march, Grainger sought to express the dare-deviltry of the cattle-raiding, swashbuckling English and Scottish "borderers" of the period as portrayed in collections of border ballads of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Melbourne, Australia and was schooled mostly under the auspices of his mother. By the age of 13, he had made his debut as a solo pianist and was soon moving to Frankfurt to study at the Hoch Conservatory. Following his education in Germany, he moved to London with his mother and slowly established himself as an international concert pianist. However talented he was at the piano; he always had a yearning to compose. It was during this period that Grainger toured the English countryside collecting folk songs straight from the source: often working-class, common folk. Grainger’s interest in this collecting was not of merely arranging these songs into neat compositions, but rather to emphasize the way the singer presented the songs, with the resulting rhythms, inflections, and ornaments.

Recorded live in concert by the Metropolitan Wind Symphony, Matthew Westgate, Guest Conductor, in Lexington MA, on March 1, 2020.