Sam Hird (baritone) and Sam Johnson (piano) perform songs by British composer George Butterworth, whose death on the Somme 100 years ago robbed us of one of our most promising musical talents. Butterworths settings brilliantly handle the themes of longing, the fleetingness of life and the folly of war that made AE Housmans Shropshire Lad poems so popular with young people at the time. Its a terrible irony that Butterworth himself suffered the fate of the young soldier in the poem that inspired his masterpiece " the spine-tingling song Is My Team Ploughing?