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Track(s) taken from CDA67888

Hypochondriacus

First line:
By myself walking
composer
1949
author of text
from Rosamund Gray, 1859

Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)
Recording details: December 2010
All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: February 2012
Total duration: 1 minutes 39 seconds

Cover artwork: naturally evolving (2009). Mark Coote (b1932)
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist
 

Other recordings available for download

Stephen Varcoe (baritone), Roger Vignoles (piano)
Hypochondriacus (1949) is a setting of a most unusual poem by Charles Lamb (1775–1834) from his collection Rosamund Gray (1859). The author was notoriously unmusical himself, amusingly so, and a setting of his words is an extreme rarity. To fully savour the piquancy of this anguished misanthropy readers should acquaint themselves with Lamb’s far more famous prose style and his Essays of Elia. Cecil Armstrong Gibbs turns this outburst of spleen into a virtuoso patter song and a musical scherzo. It reminds us that pessimism and black humour are English qualities too, and not only the province of the Scandinavians and Russians.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012

Other albums featuring this work

Gibbs: Songs
CDA67337
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