September 19, 2007
Excerpt of recent Review of "Four Rilke Songs," "Rilke Songs," and "I Have Longed to Move Away," in Music Web International
"Melodic phrases and piano accompaniment are unflashy but responsive to word and implication; there is some minor, apt word-painting, but never in the service of an over-literal response to the text and the loosely tonal harmonies are well-judged to evoke Rilke’s ambiguous atmospheres. Elizabeth Farnum gives an assured, nicely pointed performance, articulating the unforced rhetoric of both words and music very convincingly. She is very ably complemented by Margaret Kampmeier at the piano.
The three Campion lyrics which Hudson chooses to set create an attractive pattern of transformation, from the 'tyr’d thoughts' of the first, in which 'sence and spirits faile', through the possibility (but not certainty) of renewal through the power of music in the second ('When to her lute Corinna sings, / Her voice revives the leaden strings') to the resolution of the third poem’s closing lines:
'These dull notes we sing
Discords neede for helps to grace them;
Only beawty purely loving
Knowes no discord:
But still moves delight,
Like cleare springs renu’d by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in themselves eternall.'
Were there but world enough and time, it would be fascinating to compare Campion the composer’s treatment of his own words with their treatment at the hands of Joseph Hudson. But it has to suffice simply to say that Hudson comprehensively escapes the temptations of Elizabethan pastiche, without ever making one feel that he is straining after mere stylistic difference. He creates a quite un-Campion-like idiom which is yet thoroughly convincing. Some musical threads run through the three songs, very much conceived of as a sequence, in which Hudson treats Campion’s words and sentiments with all the seriousness they deserve (he’s still an underrated poet). Initially disturbed and pained, Hudon’s music moves through to a fitly radiant and affirmative conclusion. A set of songs I was delighted to discover, and one to which I shall certainly return with some frequency.
The programme ends with Hudson’s setting of Dylan Thomas’s ‘I have longed to move away’, a 1933 draft of which can be found in one of Thomas’s notebooks and which was first published in the periodical New Verse in 1935. Again Hudson finds a persuasive musical idiom which responds to the text, and the use of tenor and string quartet allows for some attractive variety of musical texture. Hudson was a new name to me, and it is one which, on the strength of his contribution to this pair of CDs, shall certainly look out for in future."
Glyn Pursglove
"Melodic phrases and piano accompaniment are unflashy but responsive to word and implication; there is some minor, apt word-painting, but never in the service of an over-literal response to the text and the loosely tonal harmonies are well-judged to evoke Rilke’s ambiguous atmospheres. Elizabeth Farnum gives an assured, nicely pointed performance, articulating the unforced rhetoric of both words and music very convincingly. She is very ably complemented by Margaret Kampmeier at the piano.
The three Campion lyrics which Hudson chooses to set create an attractive pattern of transformation, from the 'tyr’d thoughts' of the first, in which 'sence and spirits faile', through the possibility (but not certainty) of renewal through the power of music in the second ('When to her lute Corinna sings, / Her voice revives the leaden strings') to the resolution of the third poem’s closing lines:
'These dull notes we sing
Discords neede for helps to grace them;
Only beawty purely loving
Knowes no discord:
But still moves delight,
Like cleare springs renu’d by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in themselves eternall.'
Were there but world enough and time, it would be fascinating to compare Campion the composer’s treatment of his own words with their treatment at the hands of Joseph Hudson. But it has to suffice simply to say that Hudson comprehensively escapes the temptations of Elizabethan pastiche, without ever making one feel that he is straining after mere stylistic difference. He creates a quite un-Campion-like idiom which is yet thoroughly convincing. Some musical threads run through the three songs, very much conceived of as a sequence, in which Hudson treats Campion’s words and sentiments with all the seriousness they deserve (he’s still an underrated poet). Initially disturbed and pained, Hudon’s music moves through to a fitly radiant and affirmative conclusion. A set of songs I was delighted to discover, and one to which I shall certainly return with some frequency.
The programme ends with Hudson’s setting of Dylan Thomas’s ‘I have longed to move away’, a 1933 draft of which can be found in one of Thomas’s notebooks and which was first published in the periodical New Verse in 1935. Again Hudson finds a persuasive musical idiom which responds to the text, and the use of tenor and string quartet allows for some attractive variety of musical texture. Hudson was a new name to me, and it is one which, on the strength of his contribution to this pair of CDs, shall certainly look out for in future."
Glyn Pursglove