ELEANOR TOYE (Soprano)
ARTHUR CRANMER (Baritone)
THE OLD ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Conducted by FRED ADLINGTON
THE first of these songs :-
Fain would I change that note
To which fond Love hath charmed me is a setting of an anonymous poem found in The First Part of Ayres, French, Polish, and others, together with—(so the title runs on and on) by Captain Tobias Hume , who published this series in 1605. He was an officer in the Army, he played the viola-da-gamba, and he died in 1645. ATTEY'S piece is one of the charming songs that were sung to the lute in Tudor and Elizabethan days. This type of song, a peculiarly English invention, only survived for about a quarter of a century. Attey's song, which appeared in 1622, is one of the last of all the lute airs.
WE remember Arne gratefully as a good composer in a period when British music was not flourishing very strongly-the early eighteenth century.
Yet of all his music (and he was fairly prolific) only a few songs remain-among them, of course. the famous Rule, Britannia! His settings of Shakespeare are among his most graceful pieces, and two of them are in this group.
The first song comes from Love's Labour's Lost,
Act V, Scene 2, where it serves as an epilogue It paints a charming picture of cuckoo time :—
When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver white, And cuckoo buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight.
Where the bee sucks is Ariel's gay song, in The
Tempest, while waiting upon Prospero.