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Track(s) taken from CDA66920

The Children

First line:
We are the children who play in the park
composer
1945
author of text

Robert White (tenor), Samuel Sanders (piano)
Recording details: July 1996
All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: April 1997
Total duration: 1 minutes 12 seconds
 

Reviews

‘This is a very charming record’ (Gramophone)

‘A delightful, imaginatively wide-ranging anthology. A most enjoyable entertainment as well as a true voyage of discovery’ (Hi-Fi News)

‘I felt as if I was discovering these songs for the first time’ (Soundscapes, Australia)
Theodore Chanler was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1902 and died in Boston in 1961. He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and is remembered today chiefly for his songs. I thought that Chanler’s The Children, written in 1945, would be an apt metaphor. The children in Leonard Feeney’s fascinating text come and go, generation after generation… ‘Out of the darkness and into the dawn’. Songs, like children, are born—grow—and become part of society’s treasury of joy and musical feeling. Other songs follow…‘taking their places’. There is a difference, however. A beautiful song need never grow old and disappear, for upon each new hearing, a song is reborn.

Leonard Feeney has an interesting story. He was a Jesuit priest from Boston whose over-zealous interpretation and preaching of the Church’s doctrine on salvation led to his excommunication in 1953. He came back to the fold before his death in 1978. None of this theological strife need detract from the poem’s ineffable beauty.

from notes by Robert White © 1997

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