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From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Tue Feb 12, 2002  11:12 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] 20th Century Songs

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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17456 Belta' Crudele?EdgewoodVoiceStudio   Wed  2/13/2002  
17459 Re: Belta' Crudele?arado_ge   Wed  2/13/2002  

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