佳佳唱片

對比(英文詩歌選)
卡洛琳．桑普森 女高音
喬瑟夫．米道頓 鋼琴

Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and its transformation over a century: from Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus and his Lute(ca 1901) to HuwWatkins’s Five Larkin Songs, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here.
Together with Joseph Middleton, her partner on several acclaimed recital discs, she has devised a highly contrasting programme bookended by two groups of songs by William Walton–A Song for the Lord Mayor's Tablefrom 1962, celebrating the diversity of London, and three songs from Façade, the ‘entertainment’ with which the young composer gained both fame and notoriety in 1923.These frame settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilterand Frank Bridgeof poetry by writers from Shakespeare and Shelley to Keats and Yeats. In comparison, the anti-romantic poems by Philip Larkin have been described as marked by ‘a very English, glum accuracy’. HuwWatkins (b. 1976) has selected texts from across Larkin’s output, catching the various moods –ranging from a certain unsentimental nostalgia to the poet’s seemingly habitual pessimism –in settings that often carry a bittersweet sting in the tail.

The Contrast
William Walton (1902—83) A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table
The Lord Mayor’s Table · Glide gently · Wapping Old Stairs Holy Thursday · The Contrast · Rhyme
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872—1958) Orpheus with his lute · The sky above the roof · Silent Noon
Frank Bridge (1879—1941) Go not, happy day · When most I wink · Adoration Come to me in my dreams · When you are old Mantle of Blue · Love went a-riding
Huw Watkins (b. 1976) Five Larkin Songs World Première Recording
Who called love conquering · Wants · Love Songs in Age · Money · Dawn
Roger Quilter (1877—1953) Dream Valley · Fair House of Joy · By a Fountainside Arab Love Song · Autumn Evening · My Life’s Delight
William Walton Three Façade Settings
Daphne · Through gilded trellises · Old Sir Faulk
Carolyn Sampson soprano Joseph Middleton piano
TT: 81'06