Release Date: 09 January 2002
Label: Naxos - Ex Select Products / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313211326
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: SOMERVELL
Description
Arthur Somervell (1863-1937)The Shropshire Lad • James Lee’s Wife • Songs of InnocenceThe English composer Arthur Somervell was knighted in 1929, an honour bestowed in recognition of his services as Inspector of Music to the Board of Education. His interest in education had, by then, distracted his attention from composition, for which he had shown considerable early ability. Born at Windermere in 1863, the youngest son of a well-to-do shoe manufacturer, he had his schooling at Uppingham, before entering King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1883 and was awarded a doctorate in 1903. At Cambridge he had been taught by Stanford and from 1883 to 1885 he studied in Berlin at Joachim’s Musikhochschule with Friedrich Kiel and Woldemar Bargiel, the latter the son of Clara Schumann’s mother by her second husband. In London he entered the Royal College and was later a pupil of Hubert Parry. From 1894 he taught at the College. After his retirement from his position as Inspector in 1928, he went on to devote a considerable amount of his time to the School of English Church Music, and his hymns We give thee but thine own (Windermere), When wilt thou save the people? (Kendal) and Every morning the red sun (Langdale) retain an occasional place in Anglican worship, the melody titles proclaiming Somervell’s allegiance to his native Lake District. For his songs Somervell chose a wide variety of texts, with settings of poems from Shakespeare to Browning and Housman. His five song-cycles include two groups of poems by Browning, James Lee’s Wife, included here, and A Broken Arc, drawing on a number of poems. From Tennyson come verses for the cycle Maud, and from A. E. Housman verses from A Shropshire Lad, while for Love in Springtime he drew on Tennyson, Rossetti, and Kingsley. His chamber music includes a Clarinet Quintet, his choral music a setting of Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman and of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, and his orchestral music a symphony and concertos for violin and for piano. It is the songs, however, that remain a part of current English repertoire. The settings O mistress mine and Orpheus with his lute were published in 1927 as part of Three New Old Songs. The first takes its familiar words from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the second from Henry VIII, where it is sung by one of Queen Katharine’s women. Sweet Kate reworks a song by Robert Jones, published in 1609 in his A Musicall Dreame, or the Fourth Book of Ayres. Somervell’s four songs on poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence were written in 1889, dedicated to Dolly and Gwen, and simple and child-like in form and appeal, perfectly crafted examples of such work. The song cycle based on Tennyson’s monodrama Maud dates from 1898. There are thirteen songs in the whole work that traces the story from the memories of the suicide of the protagonist’s father, ruined by unfort
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
