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CHARIS 5/17/98 & 5/31/98 Concerts

In celebration of Spring, Westchester's Charis Chamber Voices will present songs of nature and love by post-romantic composers such as Elgar, Britten, Barber, Vaughan Williams, and Musgrave. The music's rich sonorities and lush melodies beautifully illustrate the expressive pastoral and love poetry of Shakespeare, Herrick, Crabbe, Clare, Stephens, and Wyatt. Susanne Peck, director of Charis, said: “This music flirts with ambiguity. The delayed cadences and resolutions keep us on the threshold of tension and release.” The concerts will be held on Sunday, May 17 (South Presbyterian Church of Dobbs Ferry, 345 Broadway - corner of Ashford/Oak Streets, Dobbs Ferry; 4 p.m.) and Sunday, May 31 (Bedford Presbyterian Church, Main Street, Bedford; 4 p.m.) Admission is $12. For additional information, call 914-931-6575.

About the Concert

Rooted firmly in the tonal, 19th-century tradition, Sir Edward Elgar (1857 - 1934) managed nonetheless to develop a unique musical personality that earned him acclaim as one of the great European Romantic artists. This achievement is all the more remarkable since Elgar had no formal musical training beyond violin lessons from a local teacher. My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land was written in 1889, the year of his marriage to Carolyn Alice Roberts. Its lyric portrayal of love and loss demonstrates Elgar's great gift for melody and for simple, touching harmony. According to John Norris of the Elgar Society, Andrew Lang, the author of the poem, initially refused permission for Elgar to use his poem. Alice, who had published a novel and had a facility for verse, wrote alternate words (beginning: “Afar, Amidst the Sunny Isles”) to the tune that Elgar had by now composed. Fortunately, Lang relented and his poem became the lyrics now associated with the tune.

Essentially a vocal composer, Benjamin Britten (1913 - 1976) won international acclaim at an early age for his operas and song-cycles. “His music is not always directly and immediately open; the emotions lie inside, so gentle, so lyrical, and yet so powerful as it reaches the heart of the listener,” said Britten's friend Mstislav Rostropovich. In his Five Flower Songs (1950), Britten sets the poems of some of his favorite Victorian nature poets.

As a pastoral lyricist, Robert Herrick (1591 - 1674, (“Daffodils,” “The Succession of Four Sweet Months”) stands first among English love poets. His tiny poems -- not one of his 1,300 poems is long -- are like little jewels. “I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers; Of April, May, of June and July flowers,” declares Herrick in the opening to Hesperides, which contains some of the most erotic verse in English. Like flowers, the pleasures of the flesh alluded to in Hesperides are threatened not by prurience or moral disapproval, but by the cold winds of time and death. Young lovers, like transient daffodils, need to seize their brief moments of pleasure, celebrating the richness and vigor of human life played out in the shadow of death.

The poems of the great East Anglian poet George Crabbe (1754 - 1832, “Marsh Flowers”) are precise, closely observed portraits of rural life and landscape. Crabbe's unparalleled ability to create atmosphere or mood through nature, even more than his unvarnished realism, sets him apart from other poets of the romantic era. The text in Britten's “Marsh Flowers” is drawn from Crabbe's poem “The Borough,” a loose collection of poems centered around a rather bleak description of the rural poverty of industrial England. The flowers, “fed by the food they love,” thrive amidst the rundown tenement houses and unpaved streets lined with coal ash and stagnant, polluted puddles. The gripping story of Peter Grimes, which Britten later adapted into an opera of the same name, is drawn from this collection.

John Clare (1793 - 1864, “The Evening Primrose”) was called the Northamptonshire peasant poet. An ill-paid farm laborer like his father, Clare's “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery,” which appeared in 1820, were an immediate success. The Evening Primrose is drawn from a subsequent collection, “The Rural Muse,” published to equal acclaim in 1835. A relatively wealthy bachelor, financial difficulties resulting from Clare's marriage and subsequent three children caused him to become insane. Clare spent the latter part of his life in an asylum happily writing poetry. Britten's exquisitely lyrical setting of “The Evening Primrose” reinforces Clare's poignant description of this fragile flower.

Samuel Barber (1910 - 1981) revealed a strong gift for lyricism in Reincarnations written in 1927. His musical style has been called neo-romantic -- almost every piece he wrote has one gorgeous tune or memorable theme. Little that Barber wrote could have been produced in the Romantic era, however; the harmonies are too complex and sometimes extremely dissonant. Like Poulenc, Barber was often at his best in writing for voice. The three poems that form the basis of Barber's Reincarnations (“Mary Hynes,” “Anthony O Daly,” and “The Coolin') are by James Stephens, who himself declares them to be “after the Irish of Raftery.” A blind, traveling minstrel, Antoine Raftery (1784 - 1835) was not a professional poet, but a man of the people who sang of their hopes, sufferings, and dreams. Much of Raftery's work is still in its original gaelic and has only recently been written down. The following historical information about Mary Hynes, Anthony O Daly, and The Coolin is courtesy of Dr. Sean Ua Suilleabhain of the University of Cork (Ireland), who translated much of it from the original gaelic:

Mary Hynes, the subject of the first song, lived in Ireland's Country Clare and is reputed to have died in 1769 at a local tower called “Thoor Ballylee,” historically a source of poetic inspiration. Raftery's passionate love poem, as translated by Stephens, brings to life the vivacious young woman whose legendary beauty “so inflamed Clare countrymen that they strayed into the bog of Cloone.” (Declan Kiberd, “Reinventing Ireland”).

Anthony Daly was captain of the “White Boys,” a violent Irish resistance movement. In 1820, he was falsely accused of firing at another man and sentenced to hang. Although the throngs lining the road begged him to escape, Daly went calmly to the gallows and was hanged without revealing the names of his compatriots. As recorded in Douglas Hyde's 1933 edition of Raftery's work, Raftery himself was there and created a song about Daly's death. Legend has it that no grass has since grown on the spot where Anthony Daly was unjustly hanged. “The Coolin,” gaelic for “the maiden with fair, flowing locks,” although attributed to Raftery, is actually based on an old Irish tale of unknown origin. Versions of it have been found in all Irish-speaking parts of Ireland. No further description of the “fair-haired” inspiration for this remarkable love poem is available.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958) received his training from Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, both composers influenced by Brahms. His diverse influences include Stravinsky, Brahms, Parry, Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Byrd, and Hindemith. Composing extensively in almost every genre but chamber music, Vaughan Williams is one of the great setters of English poetry, and vocal music comprised a large part of his output. Vaughan Williams drew his inspiration from many sources -- chiefly folk song and the English 16th-century school -- and the influence of Ravel and Debussy is frequently discernable. A melodic, lyric gift is at the heart of his work, along with a gritty harmonic toughness that places him squarely in the 20th century. Drawn from Shakespeare's “The Tempest,”Ariels's song Full Fathom Five, which reminds Ferdinand of his father presumed dead in the recent shipwreck, and The Cloud Capped Towers, with its theme of earthy transience, illustrate Shakespeare's penchant for simple, yet startling, imagery. Their sweet, unearthly quality evokes a mood of ineffable sadness. Over Hill, Over Dale, from Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream, describes the antics of Titania's henchmen as they frolic in the moon-drenched fairy world.

Born in Scotland, Thea Musgrave (1928 - present) studied at the University of Edinburgh and then at the Conservatoire in Paris, where she was a student of Nadia Boulanger. Since 1970, she has been living in the United States. Musgrave has always been interested in the dramatic situations of music, struggling to discover new means of dramatizing the structure and musical argument of each work. Dance-like and pensive by turn, Musgrave's Four Madrigals (1953) are based on poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 - 1542), a well-traveled and sophisticated courtier-diplomat credited with introducing the sonnet form and the humanism of Petrarch into England. Wyatt's love poetry suggests an intimate acquaintance with the whims and moods of those who possess and manipulate power. (Suspected as one of Anne Boleyn's lovers, Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London, ostensibly for quarreling with the Duke of Suffolk, where he witnessed her execution in 1536. Pardoned, Wyatt assumed other royal offices until his death from illness in 1542.) His work delineates the codes of manners and the formal approaches, withdrawals, and responses of courtly love. Throughout, the poet casts himself in the role of the unfulfilled lover, cultivating an air of melancholy self-pity in the face of his fickle mistresses.