Three Songs, Op 2

composer

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

No 1: 1927; No 3: 1934

Recordings

Barber: Songs
Gerald Finley (baritone), Julius Drake (piano)

Play all extracts from this album Buy by post £13.99
CDA67528

A Shropshire Lad
Alan Bates (reader), Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor), Graham Johnson (piano)

Play all extracts from this album Buy by post £13.99
CDD22044 2CDs Dyad (2 for the price of 1)

Details

No 1: The Daisies In the scented bud of the morning – O

author of text
James Stephens (1882-1950)

Gerald Finley (baritone), Julius Drake (piano)

Track 23 on CDA67528 [1'04]
English

No 2: With rue my heart is laden

author of text
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)

Gerald Finley (baritone), Julius Drake (piano)

Track 24 on CDA67528 [1'13] (Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: G. Schirmer Inc.)
English

Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor), Graham Johnson (piano)

Track 25 on CDD22044 CD2 [1'15] 2CDs Dyad (2 for the price of 1) (Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: G. Schirmer Inc.)
English

No 3: Bessie Bobtail As down the road she wambled slow

author of text
James Stephens (1882-1950)

Gerald Finley (baritone), Julius Drake (piano)

Track 4 on CDA67528 [2'51]
English

Three Songs, Op 2

EnglishFrançaisDeutsch

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’.

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Hyperion Records