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Track(s) taken from CDD22026

To Gratiana dancing and singing

First line:
See! with what constant motion
composer
February 1913
author of text

Martyn Hill (tenor), Clifford Benson (piano)
Recording details: April 1987
Seldon Hall, Haberdashers' Aske's School, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
Produced by Paul Spicer
Engineered by Antony Howell
Release date: March 1988
Total duration: 4 minutes 15 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

Christopher Maltman (baritone), Roger Vignoles (piano)
Robin Tritschler (tenor), Malcolm Martineau (piano)
Ashley Riches (bass), Simon Lepper (piano)
Browne’s best-known song, To Gratiana dancing and singing, setting words by Richard Lovelace, was composed in February 1913 for his friend, the tenor Steuart Wilson, and is one of the most beautiful creations in the entire repertoire of twentieth-century English song. The influence of Elizabethan music is apparent: the melody that forms the accompaniment is an anonymous seventeenth-century Allmayne in Elizabeth Rogers’s Virginal Book, which the composer heard in a 1908 while acting in a university production of Milton’s Comus. Over the sonorous, rich chords of the piano, treading the measure of the Allmayne, the vocal line curves and soars in ecstatic wonder at Gratiana’s performance.

from notes by Andrew Burn © 2003

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