The Blue Bird
Posted in Classical, Choral on May 22nd, 2009 No Comments »
Charles Villiers Stanford’s classic English Choral piece to words by Mary Coleridge.
‘The lake lay blue below the hill. O’er it, as I looked, there flew across the waters, cold and still, a bird whose wings were palest blue. The sky above was blue at last, the sky beneath me blue in blue. A moment, ere the bird had passed, it caught his image as he flew.’
It has that indefinable English quality, unmistakeable but impossible to explain, alluding to a world of lost content, forever out of reach, around the bend of a river, lost in the mists beyond the meadow, on the far side of the hill.
It is sung by the BBC Singers.
