Memories of a County Kerry childhood & a travelling Scot: Stephen McNeff’s Ballads of a Bogman & RVW’s Songs of Travel at Wigmore Hall for St Patrick’s Day

Stephen McNeff: Ballads of a Bogman – The Sigerson Clifford Song Cycle, Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel; Gavan Ring, Fiachra Garvey; Wigmore Hall
Reviewed 17 March 2027

Stephen McNeff’s masterly settings of poetry inspired by County Kerry with performers who seemed to identify with the material so that tenor Gavan Ring did not so much perform the songs as embody them

Sigerson Clifford (1913-1985) was an Irish playwright and poet whose most successful work was his 1955 poetry collection, Ballads of a Bogman. Though Clifford worked in Dublin, in the Civil Service, his poetry focuses on the town of Cahersiveen on the Iveragh peninsula of County Kerry on Ireland’s southwest coast. The town where Clifford had been born and brought up.

Tenor Gavan Ring was also raised in Cahersiveen,. When in 2021 Ireland’s Contemporary Music Centre brought him, pianist Louise Thomas and composer Stephen McNeff together as part of a programme to encourage creative collaboration between musical colleagues, Ring suggested Clifford’s poems to McNeff as a source for a song cycle.

The result was Stephen McNeff‘s Ballads of a Bogman – The Sigerson Clifford Song Cycle from 2022. The cycle was the centrepiece of Gavan Ring and pianist Fiachra Garvey‘s St Patrick’s Day recital at Wigmore Hall on 17 March 2026. The recital’s theme was Evocations of Home and Exile, and their programme also included Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Song of Travel setting Robert Louis Stevenson.

The plaque, designed by Alan Ryan Hall, commemorating Sigerson Clifford in Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry.

Stephen McNeff’s Ballads of a Bogman is a substantial piece, consisting of ten songs in all. Many of Clifford’s poems are in the strophic ballad form, and you can clearly hear Irish folk-music and poetry in them. Clifford’s focus is on Cahersiveen, but it is not an entirely soft-focus view. In The Ballad of the Tinker’s Son the poet contrasts the tinker’s life with his own, marooned in an office in Dublin, yet as the ballad progresses the Troubles rear their head, and we learn the poet shot the tinker’s son. That is another thing about these poems, they often have a sting in the tail, a twist in the last line. So at the end of The County Mayo with its lyrical evocation of youth, the poet makes clear he is old and looking back, whilst in The Fiddler the poet is another figure who is old and looking back.

In the musical settings, McNeff has avoided folkish evocation and really goes for it. There are no big tunes as such, and the folk rhythms are very much in the rhythm of the words. McNeff’s piano parts are complex evocations full of rich harmonies, often spiky but rarely thickly scored and frequently luminous. Against these the dramatic vocal line enabled Ring to tell these stories. Ring took a very full-blooded, theatrical approach. He sang from memory and gave us almost a dramatic recitation of Clifford’s poetry, one that happened to have music attached.

The Introduction took lines from a longer poem, I am Kerry, to create a vigorously rhapsodic curtain raiser. The Ballad of the Tinker’s Son with its long-form ballad story-telling was vivid, fast and chattering in both voice and piano. Ring and Garvey carried us away with the urgent flow of the story, but there was still space for time to slow as the poet remembered and looked back, and after the vibrant urgency of the climax, the long coda was slower and darker. The Old School used a lot of almost unaccompanied rhapsodic writing for the voice, bringing a positive spin on what seemed harsh, and perhaps reflecting the last line where the poet suggests the harsh present makes the time at the Old School seem pleasant.

There was a lighter, dance-like feel to The Boy Remembers his Father. The metrical scheme of the poem was interesting with the last line of one verse forming the first of the next, the previous thought moving into the present one. The music became more expressionist, yet still lyrical, when the poem took a leap in time from the remembrance of the past to the present with the death of the father. Unsurprisingly, The Kerry Christmas Carol mixed sentiment and harsh reality with its vision of the Holy Family stopping on their way to Egypt. McNeff’s setting was vivid and folk-inspired, yet rather free.

The piano writing on The County Mayo with its arpeggiated flow was rather expressionist, forming a spare yet spiky backdrop for the free arioso of McNeff’s setting which received a compelling performance from Ring. The short, O, Drink your Porter, Tinker man was vivid yet robust. 

The Fiddler was another long-form ballad, fast and vibrant at first with chattering piano. Yet for all the folk feel, McNeff’s rhythms were intriguingly uneven and there was space for more thoughtful, quietly intense moments. The conclusion, with the elderly poet waiting in vain for the return of the Fiddler was strange and mysterious. I am Kerry gave us in full the poem excerpted in the first song. Slow and intense, with bleak, spare piano, here the poet was in full reminiscence mode, but gradually the past took over and things grew more urgent and vivid, the penultimate verse being well fierce before the lyrical rapture of the final lines.

This was a performance where the performers seemed to really identify with the material so that Ring did not so much perform the songs as embody them. It helped that McNeff’s music, for all its fascinating complexity, allowed space for Clifford’s poetry and for Ring’s admirable projection of the words.

For all its popularity nowadays, Vaughan Williams’ song-cycle Songs of Travel had a strange start. Eight of the nine songs were performed in 1904, but when published in 1905 and 1907, they were in separate volumes and not in the composer’s order. It was only after Vaughan Williams’s death in 1958 that the ninth and final song came to light, thus bringing the cycle full circle. The work was written, I think, for baritone voice but transposed versions of the songs were created, so there was a high voice version.

Ring’s performance was full throated and dramatic, very much like his performance of the McNeff cycle. The vagabond was vibrant with an onward flow, still moving even through the quieter moments. There was a lyric beauty to Let beauty awake, yet there were moments of vibrant power too. The roadside fire was fast and vivid with constant forward momentum. Ring and Garvey were making it clear that this young man was never standing still. Youth and Love was quiet and intense, yet there was still passion and as the young man walks away, the music turned mysterious. The lyric melancholy of In dreams did not last, and passion returned. Ring sang The infinite shining heavens with vibrant sense of line, contrasting with the transparent piano writing, yet we ended in mystery again.

There was a folk-song feel to Whither music I wander, and though strophic Ring and Garvey made each phrase matter. Bright is the ring of words began vibrant and confident yet became more intimate, leading to the slower darker finale, I have trod the upward and the downward slope. Yet here, Ring made the poet rather fierce and only at the end allowed the music to run down.