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Hyperion Records

Three Songs, Op 2
composer
No 1: 1927; No 3: 1934

Recordings
Cover of 'Barber: Songs' (CDA67528)
Cover of 'A Shropshire Lad' (CDD22044)
Details
No 1: The Daisies  In the scented bud of the morning – O
No 2: With rue my heart is laden
author of text

Track 24 on CDA67528 [1'13] (Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: G. Schirmer Inc.)
Track 25 on CDD22044 CD2 [1'15] 2CDs Dyad (2 for the price of 1) (Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: G. Schirmer Inc.)
No 3: Bessie Bobtail  As down the road she wambled slow

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’.

from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2007

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