122Booklet2 7/4/08 15:56 Page 1 ALSO on signumclassics On Buying a Horse Moonstruck Remember Your Lovers The songs of Judith Weir Songs of FG Scott Songs by Tippett, Britten, Purcell & Susan Bickley / Andrew Kennedy Lisa Milne / Roderick Williams / Iain Burnside Pelham Humfrey Ailish Tynan / Iain Burnside SIGCD096 John Mark Ainsley & Iain Burnside SIGCD087 SIGCD066 Much loved mezzo-soprano, Susan Bickley, This new recording featuring masterful Sir Michael Tippett’s great masterpieces - and fast-rising stars Ailish Tynan and Andrew performances by Lisa Milne, Roderick Boyhood’s End and The Heart’s Assurance - are Kennedy perform songs written by one of Williams and Iain Burnside helps to shed light coupled here with some of his editions of songs Britain’s leading composers, Judith Weir. on an often overlooked composer, whose work by Henry Purcell, and Benjamin Britten’s stems from both the spirit of his national companion piece to Boyhood’s End - Canticle 1. identity and the tradition of the great European song composers. www.signumrecords.com Available through most record stores and at www.signumrecords.com For more information call +44 (0) 20 8997 4000 122Booklet2 7/4/08 15:56 Page 3 BRITTEN ABROAD BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913 - 1976) 18. Um Mitternacht (1960) [4.26] Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente, Op.61 Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op.22 19. Menschenbeifall [1.32] 1. Sonetto XVI: Si come nella penna e nell’inchiostro [2.09] 20. Die Heimat [2.31] 2. Sonetto XXXI: A che piu debb’io mai l’intensa voglia [1.35] 21. Sokrates und Alcibiades [2.30] 3. Sonetto XXX: Veggio co’bei vostri occhi un dolce lume [4.21] 22. Die Jugend [2.03] 4. Sonetto LV: Tu sa’ch’io so, signior mie, che tu sai [2.03] 23. Hälfte des Lebens [2.22] 5. Sonetto XXXVIII: Redete a gli occhi miei, o fonte o fiume [2.02] 24. Die Linien des Lebens [2.24] 6. Sonetto XXXII: S’un casto amor, s’una pieta superna [1.27] 7 . Sonetto XXIV: Spirto ben nato, in cui si specchia evede [4.25] Four French Folksong Arrangements The Poet’s Echo, Op.76 25. La belle est au jardin d’amour [2.51] 26. Il est quelqu’un sur terre [4.35] 8. Echo [3.03] 27. Eho! Eho! [1.59] 9. My Heart ... [1.51] 28. Quand j’étais chez mon père [2.06] 10. Angel [2.15] 11. The Nightingale and the Rose [4.00] Total timings [73.50] 12. Epigram [0.48] 13. Lines written during a sleepless night [4.24] Four French Folksong Arrangements 14. La Noël passée [3.52] SUSAN GRITTON - SOPRANO 15. Voici le Printemps [2.02] MARK PADMORE - TENOR 16. Fileuse [2.00] IAIN BURNSIDE - PIANO 17. Le roi s’en va-t’en chasse [2.12] www.signumrecords.com 122Booklet2 7/4/08 15:56 Page 5 BRITTEN ABROAD songs governs the internal structure and musical for Rostropovich and had conceived the soprano language as never before with Britten. The cycle is solo in War Requiem for Vishnevskaya. Since 1963 framed by songs of high rhetoric: the first asserts he had been considering the possibility of setting Britten’s extraordinary skill and fluency for setting settings, Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac and that just as in art there are high, middle and low Russian texts for a song collection or cycle for the his own native language has sometimes obscured Noye’s Fludde, and profoundly so in one of his very styles, so in love one evokes what is fitting to great Bolshoi diva and on his departure from the the brilliance with which he embraced a wide last works, the choral setting of eight medieval oneself; the final song is a celebration of the UK for this Armenian trip he bought a copy of range of foreign poetry throughout his career. In English lyrics, Sacred and Profane. But Britten’s immortality of love, the piano and voice only Pushkin’s poems (in Russian with a parallel fact Britten left a series of exquisite settings, settings of Italian, Russian, French and German, gradually uniting in praise of abiding love. In English translation) for the journey. Britten wrote some of his very finest, in French, Italian, Latin, are certainly amongst the most distinctive and very Sonnet XXI the vulnerability of deep attachment is this cycle while resident at the Composers’ Union German, Russian, Scots dialect and Medieval finest examples of his art, each fashioned expressed in gentler, lilting, pleading terms. Sonnet in Armenia and the central theme of the work is English; and the role-call of poets attests to the specifically for a much-loved and favoured artist. XXX is one of Britten’s profoundest inventions, an reflected in the title, referring, to the artist’s struggle diversity and sophistication of his literary tastes, intimation of things that can only be realised to elicit some response from an uncomprehending including the work of Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were through the presence of the beloved, expressed in world, a theme explored from the very outset in Artur Rimbaud, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Friedrich completed in America in October 1940 and were a seamless bel canto that climaxes in a yearning Echo. My heart touches on Britten’s personal Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander the first songs written specifically for Britten’s rising ninth in the voice. The more intense dramatic preoccupation with the heartache so often Pushkin, Bertolt Brecht and William Soutar. The life-long partner and principal interpreter, the tension of Sonnet LV gives way to the wistful aroused by the presence of great beauty. The earliest of these works (written when Britten was tenor Peter Pears, to whom they are dedicated and serenata of Sonnet XXXVIII in which the rejected confrontation between Satan and the Angel in the just fourteen) was the Quatre chansons unquestionably addressed. The metaphysical love lover begs for the return of his senses so that he may third song takes this tension onto another plane - françaises, settings of Hugo and Verlaine for high sonnets of Michelangelo are rare in their love again. Another ardent setting of Sonnet XXXII closer to the conflict between good and evil voice and orchestra, written in the summer of juxtaposition of emotional intensity and closely precedes the final rhetoric of ‘Spirito, ben nato’. common to many of the stage works. The next two 1928 for his parents’ twenty-seventh wedding worked argument, a tension between the senses Britten and Pears premiered the Michelangelo songs provide strong dramatic contrast, anniversary. Les Illuminations followed a decade and the intellect that inspired Britten to some of Sonnets at the Wigmore Hall on 23 September 1942. juxtaposing the lyricism of The Nightingale and later; Latin settings were a constant throughout his finest inventions in this cycle and a theme to the Rose with a folk-like Epigram with more than his career, for his many liturgical settings and which he was to return towards the end of his life The Poet’s Echo was written during a holiday that a nod to Mussorgsky - brief, acerbic and thrown notably in War Requiem and the Cantata in the last major work he wrote for Pears, the opera Britten and Pears spent in the Soviet Union with off in peasant style. misericordium; we find Scots dialect in his Souter Death in Venice. Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich in settings, Who are these children? and his August 1965. By this time Britten had already Lines written during a sleepless night, returns to authentic response to the challenge of early True to the bel canto tradition that inspired the written the Sonata in C (1961), the Cello the cycle’s central theme, drawing the cycle to a English texts is demonstrated in his mystery-play Michelangelo Sonnets, the vocal line in these Symphony (1963) and the First Cello Suite (1964) close on an uncomfortable, almost eerie note of - 4 - - 5 - 122Booklet2 7/4/08 15:56 Page 7 uncertainty. And the strange circumstances of the Britten first began arranging folk songs for his providing a commentary or subtext. And if one Lieder, though owing more to Berg than Schubert) first run-through of the cycle, in the Pushkin war-time recitals with Pears, initially in America turns to Britten’s later orchestrations of six of last little more than eleven minutes; not a note Museum, towards the end of their trip to Russia, and, after 1942, in England. The settings were these songs, one gets a vivid indication of the (nor indeed a silence) is wasted in the projection has certainly added to the disturbing quality of published in a series of six volumes between 1943 sonorities he had in mind when writing the piano of Hölderlin’s very personal fusion of Lutheran the song, as Pears later recalled in his Armenian and 1961, with an additional collection for voice originals - sonorities he himself was able to evoke theology and fervent Hellenism. The lyrics dwell on Holiday diary: and harp completed in the summer of 1976 and with extraordinary mastery at the keyboard. thoughts of middle age and love (Sokrates und published four years later. The volume of eight Alcibiades), Britten making a characteristically The last song of the set is the marvellous poem French Folksongs Arrangements (the second of the Um Mitternacht was written around 1960. Its shrewd selection from Hölderlin’s shorter poems of insomnia, the ticking clock, persistent published collections) was written for the Swiss precise date of composition is uncertain and it and fragments, progressing from a consideration night-noises and the poet’s cry for a meaning soprano, Sophie Wyss, an important artist for remained unpublished during the composer’s of the fragility of worldly fame (Menschenbeifall) in them.