MODERN ENGLISH SONGS
Sung by JOHN THORNE (Baritone) Miscellaneous Songs:
BAX'S song is one of a set of five Irish pieces. The words of this one (by Joseph Campbell ) tell of the piper whose song seemed a part of the hills' melancholy. The accompaniment gives us a suggestion of the pipe'splaintive music.
Scott has taken a poem of Dowson, in villanelle form-nineteen lines with but two rhymes. The poet tells how, to make his tribute, he took ' her dainty eyes as well as silken tendrils of her hair,' ' her voice, a silver bell,' ' her whiteness virginal,' and ' stole her laugh most musical.'
The last song is a modern setting of those favouritelines from Tennyson's Maud, concerning an earlier setting of which (Balfe's) the poet said that the composer had made all the notes go up where lie (Tennyson) wanted them to go down, and down where lie wanted them to go up. Whether the listener agrees with that verdict on Balfe or not, he is pretty sure to admire the spirit of Somervell's music, its exhilaration and the rhapsodical note of the lover's urgent plea.