Alistair Hinton: piecenotes
Five Songs of Tagore, for high soprano and piano, Op. 7 (1970)
These songs are the composer's earliest surviving ones for voice and piano. Their texts, from Tagore's Gitanjali and The Gardener, were chosen late one afternoon and the five settings all written that same night.
They received their premiËre the year after completion, sung by Bridgett Gill (soprano) with the composer in the same concert as the first movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 5 received its first hearing; their next performances were given by Jane Manning.
The composer's interest at the time of writing in setting Tagore's work was to lead to the cycle 'Wings of Death' (taken from Tagore's last poems) for soprano and orchestra later the same year. At this time, his String Quintet, Op. 13, was also taking shape and in its finale, also incorporating an important part for solo soprano, another Tagore setting is to be found; this work, however, was not destined to be completed until 1977.
Six Songs, for high soprano and piano, Op. 40 (2000)
Written for their dedicatee Sarah Leonard following her singing in the world premiËre recording of the composer's String Quintet, these songs were commissioned for London's Planet Tree Festival 2000. The chosen texts explore aspects of singing, solitude and dying, prompting occasional fleeting reflections of fragments from his own earlier works and those of other composers.
In two parts linked by a short piano interlude, the cycle opens with Robert Frost's sonnet "The Oven Bird", a warbler whose incessantly opinionated chatter eschews Messiaenic quotation but towards its end reveals a tiny clip from "Vogel als Prophet" from Schumannís "Waldszenen". The references to 'dust' in this and the final two songs recall the line 'and drop into the dust' as set in the first of the composer's Five Songs of Tagore (1970).
From "Songs of Travel", Robert Louis Stevenson's "Bright is the Ring" then launches into a series of bold brush strokes before subsiding into a rêverie wherein words and music (pace Strauss's "Capriccio"?) engender and reflect loversí tenderness.
Next is another sonnet, Walter Savage Landor's tribute "To Robert Browning", occasioned by the recipient's marriage and move to Italy. Material from its first line and a half as set at the close of the composer's 1979 Violin Concerto is quoted at various points. Another association behind this song, though not quoted here, was the composer's setting in his 1977 String Quintet of the final line and a half of Browning's own tribute to the 17th/18th century German theorist and composer Abt (Georg Joseph) Vogler. As it concludes, momentary allusions to Elgar's Alassio and Chopin's Barcarolle are woven into the texture and the song ends in sudden peroration. So ends the first part.
From its ecstatic conclusion, swimming in life-enhancing Mediterranean warmth and sunshine, to the implacable impenetrability of Emily Dickinson's "Exclusion", is a great leap into the dark, hence the intervening piano Interludio as preparation. This song's empty spaces convey the impression of more rests than notes. Its central stanza opens with a memory of the third movement of the Sonatina for 3 clarinets and trumpet the composer wrote in 1965 but long since destroyed.
From the nigh-oblivion wherein Dickinson inexorably draws us, even the uneasy Abscheid of Ernest Dowson's "A Last Word" seems at least an upward step, if only from the forbidding to the foreboding.
The final and longest song, Ezra Pound's early "Envoi", echoes the 17th century English poet Edmund Waller's well-known "Go Lovely Rose", famously set to music by his contemporary, the singer and composer Henry Lawes. Whilst not upstaging Waller's original, Pound's paraphrastic treatment invokes substantial character metamorphosis in the manner of the transcriber's art wherein outlines of a transcribed work provide means towards the transcriber's quite different result; it suggests a power equivalent to that which Sorabji ascribes to Liszt the transcriber - that of "of seizing upon... themes and so charging them with his own peculiar quality that, without actual alteration, they lose all semblance of their original physiognomy and become...'possessed'.". The granitic grave e severo emerging from the song's introductory flourish derives from the opening of the final part of the composer's abandoned Sonaten-Triaden for 'cello and piano (1970); the 'recherches du chants perdu' which follow - including the second and last appearance of "Vogel als Prophet" - finally give way to some sense of 'resignation and resolution' (as Levine Andrade described the hard-won close of the composer's String Quintet).
© Alistair Hinton 2000