Release Date: 30 September 2006
Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 636943905326
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: BARBER
Description
Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Choral Music Born in March 1910 at West Chester, Pennsylvania, Samuel Barber grew up with parents who encouraged an all-round education, an uncle who was a composer (exclusively of songs) and an aunt who was a celebrated contralto of international fame. Their occasional presence in the Barber household was to be the most important early influence on the young boy who announced at the age of nine that he intended to be a composer. At fourteen Barber entered the newly founded Curtis Institute in Philadelphia that opened for the first time in 1924 (he was in fact only the second student to go there). Revered by his fellow students (including Menotti), he became the star pupil excelling in all subjects and developing too a fine baritone voice. Indeed, such was the quality of his singing that he considered a career as a soloist, giving recitals and recording his own 'Dover Beach' for the NBC Network. Barber achieved orchestral success with his The School for Scandal and Essay for Orchestra, showing a creative personality inclined towards the nineteenth-century European tradition, identifying him early in his career as an unabashed Romantic. In the 1930s he earned praise for being one of the most talented composers of his age and scorn by modernists who considered his style utterly anachronistic. It was this romantic idiom, however, that won for him numerous prizes including the Pulitzer (twice) and the Prix de Rome and in 1937 he was the first American composer to be represented at the prestigious Salzburg Festival with his Symphony in One Movement. Any brief glance, however, at Barber's collected works shows a distinct bias towards music with words, and setting texts for chorus or solo songs occupied the composer throughout his creative life. Between his early Matthew Arnold-inspired 'Dover Beach' of 1933 and his large-scale choral work 'The Lovers' of 1971, setting words by the Chilean Pablo Neruda, Barber demonstrates extraordinarily wide literary interests. In particular he sought out English and Irish writers, notably James Joyce and the Anglo-Irish James Stephens, and from them developed an inclination towards Celtic texts with a melancholic and nostalgic theme, which aptly matched his own musically romantic persuasion. 'A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map' is a disturbing setting of a poem by Stephen Spender describing the death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, during which the poet had spent time in Spain. It is scored for four-part male chorus with three kettledrums, adding optional brass parts after its publication, and was written in 1940. The unsettling silences, timpani glissandi and haunting final bars all contribute to the grim reality expressed in the text. Its structure is in the form of a double refrain where each verse begins with the words 'A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map' ending with a second refrain 'all under the olive trees'. 'Under the Willow Tree', is taken from Barber's opera Vanessa
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Yaqi Yang; Margarita Parsamyan; Robynne Redmon; Minghao Liu; Frank Ragsdale; Kim Josephson; Kevin S
Vilmos Csikos; Olivier Lechardeur; Manon Lamaison
Tomas Cotik; Martingale Ensemble; Ken Selden
