On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Lea Ann Martin wrote:
> What about Duke's "lovliest of trees"? I must say that I have only heard Bryn Terfel do it...and he does a different arrangement than the duke arrangement...it's similar though...and so lovely. >
Terfel does the George Butterworth SETTING (arrangement implies a pre-existing song that is simply given a different instrumental handling; setting, by contrast, is what a composer does to a text when he puts it to music), from Butterworth's cycle of Songs from "A Shropshire Lad". The cycle was composed (albeit not explicitly) for baritone, and I've never heard any of the songs sung by any other voice - though I have toyed with the idea of doing "Loveliest of Trees" and "When I was one and twenty" myself, out of context. The rest of the songs are, frankly, a bit "macho" textually (well - as macho as you can expect from A.E. Housman), and may not feel "right" when sung by a woman, either to the singer or to the audience. In any case, the tessitura is low for a soprano, and if a woman does the cycle, it should be a mezzo or contralto.
Karen Mercedes http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html *************************************** What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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