Release Date: 06 January 2003
Label: Naxos - Ex Select Products / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313211623
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: QUILTER
Description
Roger Quilter (1877-1953)SongsRoger Quilter was born in Hove in 1877 into comfortablefamily circumstances. His father was Sir Cuthbert Quilter, who in 1881 foundedthe National Telephone Company and was for twenty years Liberal-Unionist Memberof Parliament for the Suffolk constituency of Sudbury. His early years werespent largely at the family's country house, Bawdsey Manor, near the Suffolktown of Felixstowe. Quilter, who later seemed slightly embarrassed by hisbackground, had his education at a private school in Farnborough and then atEton. In 1893, having decided to become a musician, he began a period of fourand a half years at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where he was a pupil ofIwan Knorr and the piano teacher Ernst Engesser. It was perhaps the latter,with his interest in French song, who influenced the future direction ofQuilter's talents as a composer. His contemporaries in Frankfurt included CyrilScott, Percy Grainger, Balfour Gardiner and Norman O'Neill, and the FrankfurtFive formed a group of friends both there and in later life, although Graingerhad reservations about O'Neill, a musician who made his later career chiefly inthe theatre, for which he provided a quantity of incidental music.Returning to England in 1898, Quilter quickly became knownto the London public for his songs. His Four Songs of the Sea, settings of hisown verses, were heard at the Crystal Palace in 1900, sung by Denham Price. Hewas to owe much to Gervase Elwes, who sang To Julia in 1905, and persuadedBoosey & Co. to publish the cycle. Other singers were to follow the exampleof Elwes, and Quilter's songs were performed by singers such as John Coates,Muriel Foster, Ada Crossley, and Harry Plunket Green. His work was even takenup by Melba, Clara Butt and Maggie Teyte, while Quilter himself appeared asaccompanist to his friend Mark Raphael. The many songs Quilter wrote during thecourse of some forty years form an important element in English song repertoireof the first half of the twentieth century, characteristic both of their periodand of romantic English song. He also wrote instrumental music, for orchestraor for smaller ensembles, and his A Children's Overture, with its well-knownand skilfully deployed melodic material, remains in occasional orchestralrepertoire. Quilter'shealth gave frequent cause for anxiety over the years. He suffered from boutsof depression and found his homosexuality, necessarily concealed as far aspossible, a continuing burden. He was generous in his support of fellowmusicians, not least to Percy Grainger, many of whose compositions he hadpublished at his own expense, and after the tragic death of Gervase Elwesduring an American tour, supported the foundation in 1921 of the Musicians'Benevolent Fund. His final years were clouded by mental illness and he died in1953.The present collection of Quilter's songs starts with It wasa lover and his lass [1], from Shakespeare's As You Like It, one of a set offive Shakespeare settings publishe
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
