Songs by Samuel Barber_音乐专辑
Songs by Samuel Barber
表演者: Gerald Finley/Julius Drake
流派: 古典
专辑类型: 专辑
介质: CD
发行时间: 2007-11-13
唱片数: 1
出版者: Hyperion
条形码: 0034571175287
专辑简介
The wonderful Gerald Finley, described recently as ‘the best living baritone currently at the peak of his powers’ (The Globe and Mail), brings his ‘glorious sound and great dramatic instinct’ to this fascinating selection of songs, sensitively accompanied by Julius Drake.
Barber’s songs are among his greatest musical achievements, demonstrating above all his sustained lyric impulse and graceful melodic writing. Another aspect was his well-developed literary taste. He unfailingly selected texts of high quality, including English ‘Georgian’ poets, Irish bards, the French Symbolists and poets writing in English who were affected by them, such as James Joyce, as well as some of his own American contemporaries. Throughout his song output, he found ways of embodying the poets’ thought in musical correlatives that were never merely decorative, and developed an instinctive knack for embodying words in a memorable vocal shape. Presented here are a range of early and later songs including Barber’s first success for voice, Dover Beach, which the composer sang on its first recording in 1935.
Samuel Barber’s name has come to be associated principally with orchestral music, of which he did not write very much, mainly due to the universal appeal and ubiquity of his 1936 Adagio for Strings. Yet the larger part of his output is vocal music (he even, late in life, turned the Adagio into an Agnus Dei for a cappella choir). Barber served as a church organist while still in his teens, and developed a fine baritone voice: indeed he almost became a professional singer, and studied singing at the Curtis Institute, which he entered at the age of fourteen, with Emilio de Gogorza. (He also studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero and conducting with Fritz Reiner.) Song was important to him from his earliest years: an aunt was the contralto Louise Homer, whose husband Sidney Homer was a prolific song composer. Barber’s first success was with a setting for voice and string quartet of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which he composed at the age of twenty and himself sang on its first recording in 1935.
Among American composers of his generation he was chiefly remarkable for his sustained lyric impulse and graceful melodic writing—two elements which made him a natural song-writer. Another aspect, as the choice of Arnold’s great and substantial poem may indicate, was Barber’s literary sense. He read poetry constantly and is said to have had a book of poetry by his bedside throughout his life. He unfailingly selected texts of high quality, including English ‘Georgian’ poets, Irish bards, the French Symbolists and poets writing in English who were affected by them, such as James Joyce, as well as some of his American contemporaries. Throughout his song output, he found ways of capturing the poets’ thought in musical correlatives that were never merely decorative, and developed an instinctive knack for embodying words in a memorable vocal shape.
Barber had a lifelong enthusiasm for Celtic, especially Irish literature: like the British composers Bax and Moeran he identified strongly with Ireland and its people—their humour, their melancholy, their love of words—and considered himself a sort of Irishman ‘in spirit’. He retained a great affection for the writings of James Stephens and James Joyce. His earliest published songs (the Three Songs Op 2, published in 1936) combine two settings of Stephens with a poem from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. The unforced naturalness of their utterance and the sheer charm of their appeal is enhanced by the clear textures and simple, grateful piano parts. The carefree ditty of Stephens’s The Daisies is followed by a plangent B minor setting of Housman’s With rue my heart is laden. More ambitious—indeed frankly dramatic—is the second Stephens setting, Bessie Bobtail, with its melancholy dragging rhythm (the piano’s figures in contrary motion have a drum-like effect), breaking out at last in tragic appeal. The bleak mood is confirmed by the piano’s chorale-like postlude in D minor, marked ‘with eloquence’.
Barber’s settings of poems from James Joyce’s Chamber Music, published in 1939 as his Three Songs Op 10, are already more sophisticated and developed utterances. In Rain has fallen the plashing right-hand piano figures, illustrative of the falling rain, are poised above ambiguous, impressionistic harmonies that suggest the act of memory in which the poet is engaged, and they are developed to carry the song’s passionate climax in its stormy piano outburst. Sleep now is a very unquiet lullaby, with the ‘voice of the winter’ evoked in angular, declamatory piano figures in the central section. The song’s F sharp minor tonality only resolves to a tranquil F major in the final bars. There follows one of Barber’s most impressive achievements in the voice-and-piano medium. I hear an army is an onomatopoeic tour de force, the superbly imaginative piano part evoking the thunder of horses, the calls of trumpets, and the surge of the sea. It rises to a sustained, anguished outcry at ‘My love, my love, why have you left me alone?’.
The settings of American poets that Barber published as his opus 13 confirm the broadening of his expressive range. Sure on this shining night, to a poem by James Agee, is one of his most perfect and ecstatic lyrics, the canonic melody between voice and piano and the warm, steadily pulsing harmonies creating a sense of rapt contemplation. Nocturne sets a poem by Frederick Prokosch. Its apparently peaceful opening is undercut by its fretful modulations, and as melancholy invades the music, the central section becomes an agonized appeal for rest and healing, and the return of the opening figuration at the end is now seen as a symbol of welcome oblivion in ‘the blind eternal night’.
The Mélodies passagères Op 27, composed in 1950– 51 and published in 1952, were written for and dedicated to the voice and piano duo of Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc, and are a delicate compliment both to Poulenc the composer and to the traditions of French song. Barber chose poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, normally thought of as a German poet, but who wrote occasionally in French after he settled in the Valais Canton in Switzerland. Four of the five poems are drawn from Rilke’s Poèmes fran?ais, written in homage and imitation of Paul Valéry, and one from Les quatrains valaisans. The settings prove Barber to have been as subtle a setter of French prosody as of English. The lyrically thoughtful Puisque tout passe acts as an introduction to the evocative lake landscape of Un cygne, where the calmly echoing left-hand figuration and the softly plashing fourths in the right conjure up the deep waters on which the swan glides in the voice’s sustained melodic line. In Tombeau dans un parc, the piano’s grave fourths and fifths resound like distant bells, only momentarily changing to harped arpeggios at the vision of the white dove. A more forthright and extrovert bell-piece is Le clocher chante, ringing a joyous carillon in praise of the Valais. For the final song, Départ, the piano’s melancholic left-hand ostinato forms quietly bitter dissonance with the right hand’s repeated Gs as preamble to the aching climax of ‘ce sera un point rose’.
Probably Barber’s best-known set of songs is the Hermit Songs Op 29, a group of ten settings of translations of medieval Gaelic or Latin poems attributed to Irish saints and holy persons. The composer himself wrote of the songs: ‘They are settings of anonymous Irish texts of the eighth to thirteenth centuries written by monks and scholars, often on the margins of manuscripts they were copying or illuminating—perhaps not always meant to be seen by their Father Superiors. They are small poems, thoughts or observations, some very short, and speak in straightforward, droll, and often surprisingly modern terms of the simple life these men led, close to nature, to animals and to God.’
For the most part brief and deftly limned, these delightful songs were composed in 1952–3 and dedicated to the great American patroness of contemporary music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, whose Foundation had given Barber a grant to complete the work. The premiere was given on 30 October 1953 in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, Washington by a young and then-unknown soprano called Leontyne Price, with the composer at the piano.
Barber’s chosen texts—some of the translations were specially made for him—are very varied, ranging from the reverent The Crucifixion with its cold bird-cries, to the playful The Monk and His Cat. His settings are equally well contrasted, from epigram (Promiscuity) to extended meditation (The Desire for Hermitage); they seem to offer a conspectus of Barber’s wide range of mood and characterization, as well as his sense of humour. The songs are all written without time-signatures, a device which aids their flexibility of phrasing and word-setting. Mostly they do in fact fall into recognizable metres, but the fluidly changing bar-lengths of the scherzo-like The Heavenly Banquet and the insistent toccata of Sea Snatch confirm that the stresses in these songs derive from the words, not from any independent musical design. There are also notable passages of free, unbarred recitative, as in the introduction to St Ita’s Vision (the main part of the song being a tender berceuse) or the piano cadenza that forms the intense climax of The Desire for Hermitage. The florid and syncopated The Praises of God is a song where Barber seems to draw near to the song-writing manners of his close contemporary and friend Benjamin Britten. Perhaps the best-loved of all these songs is The Monk and his Cat, on a poem famous in cat literature, beginning ‘Pangur, white Pangur, / How happy we are’. Here the lazy flowing rhythm, the piano’s mewing crushed seconds, and the bluesy harmony conjure up a warm impression of perfect human-feline contentment.
Our view of Barber as song-writer has been expanded by the posthumous publication of some ten additional early songs, of which we hear three on this disc. The very early There’s nae lark dates from Barber’s seventeenth year. The text is one of A C Swinburne’s imitations of Scots border lyrics, and Barber crafts a lyrical melodic line in imitation of Scots folksong with its ardent upward leaps of a ninth or an octave. (His model could well have been the tune to which Robert Burns’s My Love is like a Red Red Rose is traditionally sung.) The Beggar’s Song to a poem by W H Davies (the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp was used to living rough) is a satire against hypocritical Christians who rest from their labours on the Sabbath: beggars are holier still because they rest every day. The pompous fanfare-figures of the opening soon turn to bright dance rhythms, with a delicious modulation as the beggar-protagonist appeals to the tender hearts of the ladies. In the dark pinewood (1937) is another setting of a poem from James Joyce’s Chamber Music. The languorous rise and fall of the voice in unison with the rich harmonies of the piano’s right hand, shifting with ease between the darker flat side and brighter sharp side of C major, the voice broadening in augmentation towards the end, make this an especially rapt example of atmospheric love-song.
While he sometimes dismissed his youthful works, Barber retained a special affection for Dover Beach Op 3; nearly fifty years after he first composed it, he remarked on the maturity of his setting of Matthew Arnold’s text and the timelessness of the poem, saying that the emotions evoked by both words and music seemed contemporary. Clearly the exalted pessimism of Arnold’s vision struck a resonant chord with Barber. The poem depicts human misery as grounded in the loss of religious faith, isolating each human being from his or her fellows. The sea’s ebb-tide, as seen from the beach, is the controlling metaphor: it stands for the retreating ‘sea of faith’ in whose place mere Nature can offer no comfort, only a confirmation of the human predicament. Barber’s setting begins as an atmospheric evocation of the calm sea seen at night in an austere D minor. But the pitiless processes of the tides causes the emotion to darken, and the music responds with denser, more painful harmonies. The central move to a hymn-like D major brings no relaxation; the timbres of the string quartet create a strongly plangent emotional effect, most of all at the tragic return to D minor and the climactic appeal ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!’. The reprise of the opening music at the end is a daring stroke—Arnold’s ‘ignorant armies [that] clash by night’ would seem to demand more violent expression, but Barber stresses the indifference of nature in the face of human doubt.
Calum MacDonald ? 2007
曲目
Dover Beach, Op. 3 ' The sea is calm tonight
