Richard Lewis (tenor)
Mewton-Wood (piano)
Third of a series of programmes of English songs.
(To be repeated on Friday at 11.0)
(Next programme June 12)
(Another performance of Britten's Michelangelo Sonnets: June 1)
Benjamin Britten set to music, for tenor voice and piano, seven sonnets of Michelangelo (in the original Italian) while he was in America in October 1940. Shortly afterwards, when he returned to this country, they were performed, broadcast, and recorded here, and did as much as anything, before "Peter Grimes", to establish his reputation.
Michael Tippett 's "Cantata" is a setting of some words from W. H. Hudson 's autobiography "Far Away and Long Ago", the book in which Hudson recalls his childhood in the Argentine. The words come from the chapter headed "Boyhood's End", where Hudson as an old man looks back on the recollected emotions of his fifteenth birthday, when he first became afraid that he might lose his peculiar contact with nature. They describe something of what that contact meant to him as a boy of fifteen. (Harold Rutland)