Here is setting of Goethe’s short poem - the second with this title and one which Schubert also set early in his career - as an addition to my Going to Sleep anthology. It is the version by Hugo Wolf. Here are the words.
“You who are from heaven, who assuage all grief and suffering, and fill him who is doubly wretched, doubly with delight, ah! I am weary of striving! To what end is this pain and joy? Sweet peace, enter my heart.”
In the dissonant chords behind the vocal there is mental pain and anguish, from which the singer yearns for rest.
The singer is Mitsuko Shirai, accompanied by Hartmut Holl.
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Posted in Canzone on Oct 27th, 2008 No Comments »
In my previous post I paid homage to Jacques Brel, a singer of intense power and sincerity. Here is another singer who grabs you by the lapels and won’t let you go. It is the Italian singer Battisti. This is his song - I Giardini in Marzo. It starts gently, elegiacally, where he remembers his mother, how she used to dress; how he was at school, yearning to be free; and the evening you called ….
Then the chorus. Here we float away from these memories; he asks what day and time it is and tells us that we must live now, in this time, fully. His hand trembles no more. In his soul the heavens have opened and here in his melancholy he sees everything filled with love. Courage returns.
Listen to how he sings it.
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Posted in Chanson on Oct 24th, 2008 No Comments »
Jacques Brel died thirty years ago this month, not yet 50 years old. Here in memory of that majestic talent is one of his gentlest songs - L’Enfance (Childhood). Brel was admirably unsentimental and even here, when you might expect some softening of feeling, he never lets us forget that childhood is a preparation for the sadness of being grown up.
‘Childhood - who can tell when it ends, when it begins. It is nothing, a rashness, all that cannot be written down……… Childhood - the right to dream and to dream still. My father once was a seeker of gold; care is what he found.’
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The third of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is ‘Going to Sleep’. The allusion to death, strong in the fourth and final song, is absent here. It is the freedom of sleep that is yearned for, untrammeled by the cares of the day, where the spirit can enter the magic world of dreams.
‘The day has wearied me, and now I long to be enfolded in the starry night like a tired child. Hands, leave off your work; brow, forget your thoughts. All my senses long to lose themselves in slumber. And my soul, on freed wings, yearns to soar at its will so to live a thousandfold more intensely under the magic arc of the night.’
It is sung here by Jessye Norman. In an earlier post I wrote about her interpretation of these last songs of Richard Strauss. This is what I said about her singing of this third song. ‘In…..“Beim Schlafengehen” there is a quite magical passage where, after the lovely violin interlude, she follows the line of the melody in almost imperceptible gradations, starting pianissimo then drawing her voice out into a crescendo, then retreating into head voice before building up the crescendo.’ It is unsurpassed.
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This marvelous aria is from some incidental music Handel composed for a play, Alceste, that never saw the light of day. There’s nothing sinister in this song. A lover celebrates the end of a joyful day, and looks forward to the morrow when her lover, after the ‘balmy dew of sleep’, then ‘may retaste the healthful day.’
‘Gentle Morpheus, son of night, hither speed thy airy flight! and his weary senses steep in the balmy dew of sleep. That when bright Aurora’s beams glad the world with golden streams, he, like Phoebus, blithe and gay, may retaste the healthful day.’
It is perfectly sung by Emma Kirkby.
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Posted in Popular Song on Oct 14th, 2008 2 Comments »
It’s autumn - and this is London. This week has been something of an indian summer, with sunny days and temperatures in the 60s. But that hasn’t halted the season’s march, and the first reds and golds are showing on the trees at the bottom of my garden. The horse chestnuts have all gone brown prematurely, on account of some bug that has got into them, but the conkers are still prolific. Walking down the avenue of chestnuts towards St Mary’s Church last week was hazardous - more than once falling conkers bounced off my bald head.
Still this isn’t really the place to be in autumn - or the Fall as Americans so poetically put it. It is over there. A place, I sadly confess, I have never been to. But here’s how in my dreams it would be - in New York. A young Frank Sinatra singing, in 1947, this wonderful Vernon Duke song.
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This song was written by the Irish singer, Sinead Lohan, and recorded by her on her album ‘No Mermaid’. She sings it there with her characteristic dreamy innocence and charm. Unfortunately the album is infected with the virus of an overactive producer who seems to have insisted on adding extraneous effects to the musical background and filtering the sound through a coke-lined sieve. For a few hearings this is exhilarating but thereafter starts to tire the ear. Here is the song sung straight, and very good it is. It is performed by the American country group, Nickel Creek.
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Posted in Folk Music on Oct 6th, 2008 No Comments »
I posted earlier (Kilkelly) about separation and the effects of emigration, on those left behind. Here is a song on a similar theme but from the other standpoint. The widespread practice among the peasantry of dividing the land equally among the sons ensured that they could not all survive on the fragments handed down to them. Some had to seek work elsewhere. Before mass emigration to America, the main option was soldiering.
“When he sleeps he dreams he’s a farmer again, but now he’s a man of war.”
Here it is by the Albion Band, from a live concert. I don’t know where or when but within the last ten years.
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I am offering this as part of my ‘Going to Sleep’ anthology and as a supplement to my earlier post in tribute to the late Bernadette Greevy. Here she is singing the most famous of all lullabies. It is simply and beautifully done.
The pianist is Paul Hamburger.
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Posted in Popular Song on Oct 5th, 2008 No Comments »
I have just done a post here at my other blog, on the dance routine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did to Jerome Kern’s ‘Pick Yourself Up’ in the the film ’Swingtime’ (1936). As a supplement to that here is Fred Astaire singing it, from a commercial recording made around the same time.
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