Earth’s Call: Songs for Soprano & Piano by John Ireland | Somm SOMMCD0137

Earth’s Call: Songs for Soprano & Piano by John Ireland

£13.25 £11.27

save £1.99 (15%)

special offer ending 27/05/2024

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: Somm

Cat No: SOMMCD0137

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Release Date: 28th April 2014

Contents

About

The songs of John Ireland form an important part of his output and are highly regarded by professional singers, who appreciate the lyrical contours of his melodies, the sensitivity of his word settings and the wide variety of moods they encompass. As a first-rate pianist himself, and the composer of a large body of strikingly individual works for piano solo - including a popular concerto for the instrument (SOMMCD242), Ireland’s accompaniments to his songs are highly effective counterparts to the vocal lines

Most previous recordings of Ireland's songs have featured male voices – tenor and baritone – but this new collection contains several first recordings by a soprano. It also features a world première recording: Variations sur ‘Cadet Rousselle’ (sung in French), which Ireland wrote in 1918 in collaboration with three composer friends – Arnold Bax, Frank Bridge and Eugene Goossens – as a tribute to the music critic Edwin Evans, a staunch champion of both French and British music.

Apart from the beauty of her voice, American Soprano April Fredrick’s most outstanding characteristic is her passion for nuance and text which gets to the heart of both music and character. She was semi-finalist in the 2009 Kathleen Ferrier Awards and the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Robert Winston’s Musical Analysis: Ivor Gurney’, and was named Young Outstanding Musician of the Year at the 2010 Brighton Early Music Festival.

Mark Bebbington has been acknowledged in recent years as one of the most distinguished pianists of his generation. His enthusiastic championship of British music is second to none, and his four volumes of John Ireland’s complete piano music on Somm have received widespread acclaim.

Error on this page? Let us know here

Need more information on this product? Click here