Posted in Classical on Sep 30th, 2008 2 Comments »
The great Irish contralto Bernadette Greevy died last week. In memory of her and her wonderful voice (the finest contralto voice since Kathleen Ferrier) here is a recording of her singing Elgar’s Sea Pictures. It is taken from a broadcast of a public concert on 7 July 1985, with the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maurice Handford. The recording quality is not of the finest (it was taped from my radio) but that lovely voice shines through unscathed.
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There are two famous versions of this song, from the 1930s. One from Al Bowlly, with Ray Noble’s Orchestra, and this one, from Bing Crosby. Crosby was still singing in his youthful manner, not yet the ‘Old Groaner’, and in the higher part of his voice. It was recorded in 1934. In the later thirties and into the forties his voice darkened and he sang more in the lower register, as a newer generation of popular singers, including, most notably Frank Sinatra, appeared and began to sing in a more breathy, close up and intimate style.
Bing’s singing is direct and clear, without affectation. In his own style, he was a master - and he made singing seem so easy. When we sing in the bath, we are trying to sing like him.
He also whistles.
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One of the most famous of all lullabies - Schubert’s ‘Wiegenlied’, written in 1816 after an anonymous poem.
‘Sleep in her lap, soft as down, as love’s pure notes echo still around you. After sleep, a lily, a rose, shall be yours.’
The singer is Irmgard Seefried.
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Posted in Folk Music on Sep 25th, 2008 No Comments »
This is a traditional Scottish love song, here sung by Sinead O’Connor, live, from a broadcast concert in February 2003. The song is sung from the male point of view, Sinead sings it straight, in both senses of the term. She does not pretend to give it a fashionable gay allusion. It’s a man’s song and she sings it as such.
Her voice is far from perfect. It is breathy and limited in range. There are times when it seems close to the end of its tether, but she keeps control of it. Its hard edge is still there at higher volume. For the most part it is whispered, her lips close up against the microphone. And she manages to invest it with an intimacy that other versions miss. It’s not a declaration of love more a man pleading and helpless in the pain of a love that is beyond his power to control.
“I wish I was in some deep valley, where womankind cannot be found, where little birds sing on their branches every morning a different song.”
O’Connor captures better than anyone else the abject helplessness of a man’s love, his own fascination with the object of it, and the agony of his doubt about its being returned.
It is unforgettable.
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I heard this song when I was young, on an old 78rpm record. It haunted me for years. Yet it’s just a sentimental song from the early years of the twentieth century. The singer begs a loved one (we don’t know if it is lover, mother, friend) to sing her to sleep so that she can be at rest from the cares of the day. The singer is passive, almost helpless, at the end of her tether. Sleep is anaesthetic. Her love is for those who can give her the rest she craves - only “God and you” are true. At first hearing I find the song charming, but after more hearings I begin to find it strange and disturbing.
In Robert Guediguian’s film, La Ville est Tranquille (2001), about the urban underclass in Marseilles, a young woman lives with her mother and small baby in a flat in a down at heel part of town. She is a drug addict. Her mother works in a fish cannery to support herself and the child and her daughter’s heroin habit. The mother finds it increasingly hard to get enough money to buy drugs, and her daughter becomes restless, anguished and vicious. Finally after months of struggling with her daughter’s demands, she reaches the end of her tether. She prostitutes herself to get enough money and returns to the flat with heroin. The daughter’s look, when she realises what her mother has brought, is one of radiant love, as she anticipates the drugged bliss of the sleep to come. Her mother gives her an overdose and the sleep in permanent.
The singer is Essie Ackland.
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This is one of two great settings (the other is Schubert’s) of this shortest of Goethe’s poems. He wrote it as a young man on a walking tour and inscribed it on the wall of a mountain hut where he slept the night. Then the words carried the sense of soft repose after a day of healthy exercise. Returning many years later as an old man, to look again on the words he had left there, they must have taken on quite another connotation.
Peace lies over all the hills; in the treetops there is barely a stir. Birds are hushed in the wood; wait just a little while, soon you too will be at rest.
I heard this sung by Dame Margaret Price at a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on 1 February 1995. She sung it as an encore, in memory of Geoffrey Parsons, the great accompanist, who had died the previous week.
Here it is sung, most beautifully, by Christine Schafer, accompanied by Graham Johnson.
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The moment in this series on Sleep where sleep becomes the metaphor for death. This is nowhere explicit in the song itself, Henry Purcell’s ‘Evening Hymn’. The references are to the sun, its decaying light, and the soft bed whereon ‘my body I dispose’, and the offer of myself to the arms of God for His safekeeping in ’sweet security’. It is prayer. ‘Then to my rest. O my soul’.
Yet this is one of those heart-aching pieces that often is played at funerals, as if by some natural recognition that in all its words and its final offering of the soul to God at the end of the day it becomes a song of eternal rest and a plea for His perpetual light now, more than the sun, to shine upon us for ever more.
The singer is Emma Kirkby. I have heard this sung many times and no-one matches her.
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My second post on Sleep follows on from the lullaby theme of my last one. But here it is lullaby with menace. From a fairy story. And how terrified are we, as children, lost in our dreams of the fairy story, by the unknown threat of violation that lurks in the forest of sleep.
Englebert Humperdinck’s opera ‘Hansel und Gretel’ is a classic - but it frightens children as much as it charms their parents. Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest, run away from home and the wrath of their parents after spilling the milk in the jar. Around them the forest closes in, in the dark of night. Fear surrounds them. They cling to each other till their eyes droop - and the Sandman arrives. To sprinkle sand in their eyes and usher in the darkness. And as if fearful of the unconsciousness of sleep they momentarily shake themselves out it and the Sandman’s spell - to pray. So they kneel, as the children they are, as if at the side of their bed (like once I did), and pray together for angels to come and guard them; two at their head, two at their feet.
The prayer saves them for the morning, when reality, and real terror, arrives.
This is Adelaide Wette as the Sandmann and Irmgard Seefried and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Hansel and Gretel.
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This is the first in a series on the music of sleep. Sleep as rest, repose, comfort and relief - and too as that symbol of our last repose on earth, in death.
Let’s start with what comforts. The lullaby. Is there any other word in English more comforting that ‘lullaby’? That sense of being surrounded by love and sent, bye and bye, to sleep……. So even if we can’t remember the lullabies that were sung to us, we respond to them now as if we do - in that moment of heart’s ease that overcomes us as we listen.
Here’s one of the loveliest. It was originally thought to have been written by Mozart. But later was found to have been one of his pupil’s, Bernhard Flies - ‘Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf ein’. Here it is sung, in a version unmatched, by Rita Streich.
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Petula Clark recorded this version of the Lennon and McCartney song in 1965, a year or so after the Beatles had their massive hit with it. She sings it as a ballad. The Beatles’s version is a song sung for sixteen year olds. Clark makes it a song for grown ups. The lyrics (it was one of Lennon and McCartney’s early compositions) in the mouths of the Beatles seem naive, trivial and clumsy. It’s a teenage pop song with a good tune. In Clark’s version the song enters another dimension. The words become the faltering utterances, the humble inner yearning of someone just embarked on the first tentative steps of an adult love affair. The orchestral arrangement is lush, typical for a ballad recorded in the 60s.
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