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Contents:
DDD 74:54 Recorded: Potton Hall, Suffolk 8–9 March 2003 1-5 Birthday Madrigals
Music: John Rutter: The first performance of the Birthday Madrigals was given in Cheltenham Town Hall on 3 June 1995 with the composer conducting. The first movement sets words by Shakespeare and was written in 1975, but the remaining four movements were added in 1995. All have madrigalian texts.
6
Lullaby of Birdland From a tribute to George Shearing, we move to one of his own most enduring jazz songs. Written by Shearing and George Weiss in 1952, this tune actually refers to the New York jazz club ‘Birdland’ and was famously recorded by the great Sarah Vaughan in 1954, becoming one of her biggest hits. George David Weiss remains one of the world’s top songwriters with such hit numbers as Can't Help Falling In Love, What A Wonderful World, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Mr. Wonderful, Too Close For Comfort, Wheel of Fortune and Let's Put It All Together. 7 A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square
Music: Manning Sherwin (arr.
John Drewery) From Birdland in New York - to a nightingale in London. This poignant romantic ballad was originally written by Sherwin and Maschwitz for their 1915 London musical “New Faces”. It was twenty-five years (1940) before it travelled to the USA, since when many famous versions have emerged: most notably Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Manhattan Transfer with their a capella version of 1981. The choral arrangement recorded here, made for the Collegiate Singers in 1983 by John Drewery, rates amongst the best and has featured in many concerts of the Vasari Singers. 8-9 Dances in the Streets
Music: Bob Chilcott It’s a short distance from Berkeley Square to Soho and Paddington in West London. Although the words are in French, Paul Verlaine’s poems from “Romance sans Paroles” are here given an English title by the composer, Bob Chilcott. “The poems burst with character and atmosphere”, he says, “and I used them to reflect on two areas of London. The first, “Soho”, is a jig, a popular dance in nineteenth-century London, and the racy lyric is set in a direct and folksy way. In the second, “Paddington (Regent’s Canal)”, I have attempted to capture the atmosphere of a song from the Sixties that might have been sung by a singer such as Yves Montand, and here the song is cast as a languid tango.” Chilcott wrote these two songs in December 2000 as a commission from the Vasari Singers to celebrate their 21st anniversary in 2001. 10 Moon river
Music: Henry Mancini (arr. Clay Warnick "I kind of knew what to write, at least what track I should I be on, by reading the script and Audrey’s big eyes gave me the push to get a little more sentimental than I usually do. Those eyes of hers could carry it. I knew that. Moon River was written for her.” Who else but Audrey Hepburn, the star of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, as described by Henry Mancini himself. He goes on, “No one else has ever understood it so completely. There have been more than a thousand versions of Moon River, but hers is unquestionably the greatest. When we previewed the film, the head of Paramount was there, and he said, ‘One thing’s for sure: that f**king song’s gotta go.’ Audrey shot right up out of her chair! Mel Ferrer [Audrey Hepburn’s husband] had to put his hand on her arm to restrain her. That’s the closest I had ever seen her come to losing control." And Audrey Hepburn gives her view of the song in a letter to Mancini:
Dear Henry,
“Moon River” won the Academy Award in 1962 for Best Original Song.
11
Autumn Leaves The unforgettable lyrics by Johnny Mercer for “Autumn Leaves” were not in fact original, but an English adaptation of words by the French poet Jacques Prevert, a friend of the composer, Joseph Kosma. The song, originally entitled “Les feuilles mortes”, was written for Marcel Carné’s 1946 film “Les Portes de la Nuit”, screenplay by Prevert and starring Yves Montand. In the English version it became the title song to the Columbia movie “Autumn Leaves” starring Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson. Here, Andrew Carter beautifully creates an atmosphere of nostalgia; the tempo indication is simply - “tristement”.
12
Deep Purple Peter de Rose was a New Yorker - born there in 1900 and died there in 1953. His most successful decade as a composer was the 1930s, although he had been publishing songs since he was 18. And together with his wife, May Singhi Breen, he had his own radio series for sixteen years (1923-39) – they were billed as “The Sweethearts of the Air”. “Deep Purple” was his biggest hit, and it appeared originally as a piano solo in 1933. A year later, Paul Whiteman had it orchestrated for his band and performed it widely, still as an instrumental. But the popularity of the piece really began when lyrics were added in 1939 by Mitchell Parish.
13 Calico Pie Edward Lear (1812-1888) is best remembered today for his nonsense poetry, but he was trained as a draughtsman and worked first for the Zoological Society and then the British Museum. He was later employed by the Earl of Derby to make coloured drawings of his employer’s birds and animals. Under the Earl’s patronage he travelled widely, especially to Italy, and painted many landscapes. Lear’s first volume of nonsense verse was written and illustrated for his patron's grandchildren in 1846. An air of ludicrous fantasy, as well as a deep sense of sadness marks his verses. This melancholy is well captured in Grayston Ives’s wistful setting.
14
Sit down you’re rocking the boat
An original Grayston Ives song is followed by his show-stopping arrangement of one of the hit numbers from the brilliant musical “Guys and Dolls”. The show opened on 24 November 1950 at the 46th Street Theater and ran for 1200 performances before moving to Broadway. Between 1951 and 1992, the show won a total of 15 Tony Awards, and in 1956 the movie won two Golden Globe awards and four nominations for Academy Awards.
‘Nicely Nicely Johnson’
here gives us his own particular ‘confession’ – a dream that transforms an
inveterate sinner into a member of the Salvation Army.
Music: George Gershwin
(arr. William Stickles) This haunting number comes from Gershwin’s masterpiece, his three-act opera “Porgy and Bess”, written in 1935 and succesfully uniting American vernacular styles with the traditions of the opera house. It was intended for performance at the Metropolitan Opera, but incredibly didn’t receive its first performance there until fifty years later on 6 February 1985. The first complete performance took place in Boston on 30 September 1935 and later transferred to Broadway. The scene is Catfish Row, a Negro tenement on the waterfront of Charlestown, South Carolina in the 1920s. Clara sits rocking her baby, singing this gentle lullaby.
16
Love Is Here To Stay This song was written for the 1938 movie “The Goldwyn Follies”, which also included songs by Ray Golden, Richard Rodgers and Kurt Weill. This was the last score that George Gershwin wrote before his death in Hollywood in 1937. The story of the film tells of a movie producer who chooses a simple girl to be "Miss Humanity" someone who will be able to look at his movies from the point of view of the ordinary person. The movie won Academy Award Nominations for Best Score - and Best Interior Decoration! The song was also used in the 1951 film "An American In Paris" starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
17
Long Ago And Far Away Another New Yorker, Jerome Kern was born there in January 1885 and died there at the age of 60. This wonderful song was the musical highlight of the film “Cover Girl” of 1944, starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. In fact, the song was nominated for an Oscar and was a major factor in the film’s success. Another of the major factors was Rita Hayworth, who became the most popular pin-up girl of the Second World War – even if she did marry Orson Welles during production of the movie! In this arrangement, Ken Naylor gives it the full romantic treatment.
18 All the things you are
“The arrangement of this
beautiful Jerome Kern melody is in four distinct styles: (a) traditional choral,
b) baroque scat, c) big band, and d) a Louis Armstrong-like 'tag' at the end. It
was interesting to note that a lovely melody can survive many different
treatments.” [Ward Swingle] The text is taken from “As you like it” (Act V, scene iii) and has often been used by composers for musical setting, from the Elizabethan period (Thomas Morley) to the present (two contemporary versions on this CD). Compare and contrast here the approaches of John Rutter and Ward Swingle to the text, both capturing the mood of the piece in their own distinctive way.
“It was fun to take
small phrases from the original text, like "hey ding a ding" and "hey nonino"
and transform them into guitar-like scat syllables.” [Ward Swingle]
Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
published some 60 compositions of which 41 are piano “rags”.
Though his music was commercially successful, he was regarded by the
establishment patronisingly as a mere tunesmith. In any case, opportunities for
black musicians to have their music heard in the “serious” musical world were at
that time few and far between. “Weeping Willow” was written in 1903 and this
arrangement is for men’s voices. Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, described as “a riddle wrapped in an enigma”, was born in Iowa in 1903 and took the Roaring 20’s jazz scene by storm. He died in 1931, aged only 28, having resorted to drink to try to escape the demons that dogged his complicated personal life. On the one hand, he was a brilliant cornettist, pianist and composer, known the world over, playing with all the top jazz orchestras of his day; on the other hand, he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1929 and eventually succumbed to his addiction to alcohol. The legend lives on in his recordings and the five piano pieces he wrote; “In A Mist” was composed in 1926. “My arrangement is basically an adaptation of Bix Beiderbecke's piano piece, with lyrics by Tony Vincent Isaacs. Of course, Beiderbecke was famous as a jazz trumpeter, but he taught himself to play the piano, and produced this remarkable work, much under the influence of Debussy and Ravel.” [Ward Swingle]
22
L’Amour de moi “This arrangement was the result of a camping trip with my wife and family in France a few years ago. We were singing songs around the campfire when a young French girl sang an old folksong, “L’Amour de Moi”. I was stunned by the romantic beauty of the melody, and curious to know how it was that the source of such a lovely song could remain anonymous” [Ward Swingle]
Joseph Canteloube (of
“Songs of the Auvergne” fame) also took this beautiful melody and arranged it in
a very simple yet equally exquisite way. The Vasari Singers included this
arrangement on their “Pastorale” CD (Guild Music: GMCD 7199). “‘Country Dances’ is a kind of free-for-all of old American folk songs, relating, more or less, the story of a man [an old fiddle-player] having trouble getting his roof repaired. The only serious moment comes when the three key songs of the Civil War are joined together: “Dixie” for the South, “Yankee Doodle” for the North, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” for both sides, though with quite different lyrics.” [Ward Swingle] This has been a hot favourite for the Vasari Singers and their audiences over many years, the final line of the song making a fitting close to an evening. Page revised 13.10.03 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
