Arthur Sullivan - The Harmonious Echo (Various Artists)

Information

Composer: Arthur Sullivan

CD1:

1. King Henry’s Song
2. The Lady of the Lake
3. I heard the nightingale
4. Over the roof
5. Will He Come?
6. Give
7. Thou art weary
8. Te moon in silent brightness
9. O fair dove! O fond dove!
10. The snow lies white
11. Looking Back
12. Looking Forward

CD2:

1. The Maiden's Story
2. Living Poems
3. The Sailor's Grave
4. Let  me dream again
5. Other Days
6. Little Maid of Arcadee
7. The Distant Shore
8. The  love that loves me not
9. A Shadow
10. The Lost Chord
11. The Absent-Minded Beggar

Mary Bevan, soprano

Kitty Whately, mezzo-soprano

Ben Johnson, tenor

Ashley Riches, bass-baritone

David Owen Norris, piano

Date: 2021

Label: Chandos

https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2020239

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Review

This second instalment of David Owen Norris’s collected edition of Sullivan’s songs adds a further well-chosen singer, mezzo Kitty Whately, to the three equally appropriate voices heard on the first volume (2017): like soprano Mary Bevan, tenor Ben Johnson and baritone Ashley Riches, she brings clear diction and a good range of tone to the material – much of it forgotten today.

In his informative notes, pianist and Sullivan expert Norris suggests that the themes of the songs, so readily associated with the Victorian era that extended just beyond the composer’s lifetime (1842-1900), have acquired renewed relevance to our time, with their ‘preoccupation with death from disease’. More widely, they deal with ‘courtship, marriage and children, change and decay and supernatural consolation.’

That said, they are uneven, invariably technically adroit while not always presenting the composer at his considerable best; that’s partly down to the variable quality of the texts. But there are certainly highlights here, in the genres of drawing-room ballads, separately published extracts from incidental music and operas (the largely lost Thespis and The Sapphire Necklace, for instance), or the potent Kipling setting ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, a fundraiser for the dependents of Boer War soldiers in which all four singers join, led by Riches, who supplies exactly the common touch required. There are other impressive discoveries – ‘Thou art weary’, ‘The moon in silent brightness’, ‘Other Days’ – while in Whately’s visionary performance, ‘The Lost Chord’ registers as the masterpiece it is.

-- George Hall, BBC Music Magazine

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2021/May/Sullivan-songs-CHAN20239.htm

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2021/Jun/Sullivan-songs-CHAN20239.htm

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-harmonious-echo-songs-by-sir-arthur-sullivan-mw0003501380

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Arthur Sullivan (13 May 1842 – 22 November 1900) was an English composer. He is best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. Sullivan composed 23 operas, 13 major orchestral works, eight choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous hymns and other church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. The best known of his hymns and songs include "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Sullivan

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