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Sir John Babirolli leads the legendary Hallé Orchestra on this fantastical programme, featuring Butterworth's "A Shropshire Lad" and Bax's "The Garden of Fand". "Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad" is a song cycle for baritone and piano composed in 1911 by George Butterworth (1885–1916). It consists of settings of six poems from A. E. Housman's 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. According to the music historian A. V. Butcher, Butterworth "was intimately concerned with the collecting and editing of folksongs, and he found a traditional tune in the Dorian mode which could be happily wedded to 'When I was one-and-twenty'." No such tune has, however, been identified. "The Garden of Fand" (1916) is a tone poem by the English composer Arnold Bax. It was inspired by an Irish mythical figure, Fand, the daughter of the lord of the ocean. The work does not portray the events of the mythical tale, but evokes Fand's island. The composer had been greatly influenced by Celtic culture in his earlier works, but described this one as his last in that vein. Born in London of Italian-French parents, Sir John Barbirolli (1899–1970) trained as a cellist and played in theatre and café orchestras before joining the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood in 1916. His conducting career began with the formation of his own orchestra in 1924, and between 1926 and 1933 he was active as an opera conductor at Covent Garden and elsewhere. Orchestral appointments followed: the Scottish Orchestra (1933–36), the New York Philharmonic (1936–42), the Hallé Orchestra (1943–70) and the Houston Symphony (1961–67). Barbirolli guest conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras and was especially admired as an interpreter of the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Puccini and Verdi. He made many outstanding recordings, including the complete Brahms and Sibelius symphonies, as well as operas by Verdi and Puccini and much English repertoire.