North of Ireland
CAROLYN DOBBIN mezzo-soprano IAIN BURNSIDE piano
AMY NÍ FHEARRAIGH soprano * INGRID SAWERS piano **
tracks are premiere recordings except 4-8 and 25
I’d like to thank my incredibly patient and supportive husband Stephen McCarron and my brother Stephen Dobbin for his financial support in making this recording possible. My thanks to Paul at Delphian records for believing in these projects, to Iain Burnside for his world-class playing and support, to my witty friend Ingrid Sawers who played the Trimble duets beautifully, to talented Amy Ní Fhearraigh for battling through train strikes in Germany to make it to Edinburgh, to Nuala McAllister Hart and her insightful knowledge of Dorothy Parke, to Joanna McVey, daughter of Joan Trimble, for her personal experience of her mother’s compositions, to Gordon Cree, Madeleine Pierard and Aeron Preston for their fantastic typesetting. To Fran Marshall’s beautiful portrait photography and Will CoatesGibson’s on-site photography, to my mum and dad (since departed) for travelling to Dublin years ago with an old Instamatic camera to take photos of one particular manuscript for me as I was working abroad.
I’d also like to thank the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, CMC and British Library for their help and access to their archives and to those who have donated or left music to me over the years, enabling me to highlight the work of two trailblazing yet, till recently, underrated women composers. — Carolyn Dobbin
Recorded on 13 July 2023 and 29-30 January 2024 in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Pianos: Steinway model D, serial no 600443 (2016); Yamaha C6X Grand, serial number 6374447 (2014)
Piano technicians: Norman Motion, Al Edmondson
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: Henry Howard
Cover painting: Original artwork by Carolyn Dobbin
Session photography: Will Coates-Gibson/Foxbrush
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK
www.delphianrecords.com
Dorothy Parke is now principally remembered for her songs for children. Her solo compositions are still popular competition choices at Music Festivals and Feiseanna, generations of children enjoying their lively tunes and strong rhythms. But her compositions, although small-scale in their instrumentation, are many and varied. There are over 200 songs, instrumental pieces, duos, trios and piano solos, many of them unpublished and unperformed. She remains one of Ireland’s most popular classical composers, despite that popularity resting upon just a few often-heard songs.
Her background was middle-class and prosperous. She was born on 29 July 1904 in Dunnfield, in the Waterside area in Derry, to Robert Parke, an accountant, and his Scottish wife Agnes. By 1910 four children had been born to the couple, but three of them had either been stillborn or died shortly after birth. One had been Dorothy’s unnamed twin, something she never spoke about. Dorothy was a much loved and cherished child.
Both parents were keen amateur singers. Dorothy remembered being taken to choir practices as a child by her parents, and said that this early exposure to choral music influenced her greatly when she started to compose. In her memoirs she cites the composer Charles Villiers Stanford as a key musical influence.
Another important influence was her music teacher in Derry, Ethel Whyte. The two were to remain lifelong friends. With Whyte, Dorothy studied piano, harmony and violin – a wide musical education for a girl at that time. While in her teens Dorothy was already composing: she entered, and won, the Composition Class of the Londonderry Feis in the early 1920s under a nom-de-plume. Also around this time, in 1925, pupil and teacher together published a piece for violin and piano, A Croon.
In 1926 Dorothy won the Composition Class in both the Londonderry Feis and Dublin’s Feis Ceoil, this time under her own name. Her entry for both was Terry Neil the Fiddler, a setting for voice and violin of a poem by Elizabeth Shane. The adjudicators, Hamilton Harty in Dublin and Richard Terry in Derry, separately encouraged her to go to London to study, which she did the following year.
At first Dorothy studied privately with just two tutors: Ambrose Coviello for piano and Paul Corder for composition. The following year, in autumn 1928, she became a full-time student at the Royal Academy of Music with the same two teachers. In the relatively short time she spent at the RAM she achieved some notable successes. Apart from gaining the Royal Academy Licentiate (LRAM), she was awarded the Cuthbert Nunn Prize for Choral Composition for a work for women’s voices, and two movements of a Sonata for Violin and
Piano, performed at the end-of-year Students’ Concert in June 1929, were favourably reviewed in The Era.
After graduating Dorothy returned to Derry and began teaching piano and violin from her parents’ house. Soon, however, she was also teaching in Belfast, at H.B. Phillips’ piano studios. By 1938 she had moved permanently to Belfast, and for the next forty years devoted herself to teaching, performing and composing.
Her first published composition was Kilkeel, in 1933, a song for solo voice with piano accompaniment set to verses by the Mourne poet Richard Rowley. This was followed by St Columba’s Poem on Derry, a musical tribute to her home city.
It was Dorothy’s good fortune that the beginnings of her career as a composer coincided with the emergence of the BBC as a potent force in the cultural life of Northern Ireland. It was in fledgling 1930s BBC broadcasts that her music was first performed and heard by a listening public. The earliest of these was a St Patrick’s Day programme from Belfast in 1931, in which the contralto Muriel Childe sang several of Parke’s settings of Richard Rowley’s poetry. Altogether, in the period between 1930 and 1984, there were over forty BBC radio broadcasts of her music, on the Home Service, Forces Radio (during the war), and regional programmes.
Dorothy met her future husband Douglas Brown in 1938. Eight years Dorothy’s junior, he was already a well-known music teacher and a much sought-after church organist. They were married on 9 December 1940. Their close, if childless, marriage lasted thirty-seven years. In the teaching room of their South Belfast home there were two grand pianos: a Steinway on which Dorothy played and taught, and a Blüthner for Douglas. They performed as a piano duo at concerts in the city and in BBC Radio broadcasts. They shared a love of animals, particularly cats, for whose welfare Dorothy campaigned throughout her life.
In the post-war years Dorothy had a number of piano pupils who went on to have celebrated careers in music: the opera singers Norma Burrowes and Marjorie Wright, the conductor Kenneth Montgomery, and Derek Bell of The Chieftains
At this time Dorothy and Douglas were part of a small close-knit group of musicians in Belfast, including Havelock Nelson, Billy Boucher, C.J. Brennan, Howard Ferguson, Norman Hay and David Curry. The Browns were leading members of the ‘Performers’ Club’: amateur and professional musicians who met regularly to perform each other’s compositions and enjoy each other’s company. One member of the club was the composer and conductor Havelock Nelson, who became a close personal friend. Nelson and Dorothy shared a music prize
together, when they tied for first place in a CEMA (later the Arts Council of Northern Ireland) Competition for the 1951 Festival of Britain, Dorothy’s entry being the song cycle A Honeycomb, which was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio.
The decade before and those immediately after the Second World War were when Dorothy was most productive. The majority of her compositions are songs, for which Dorothy used the verses of a wide range of poets, including Walter de la Mare, Eleanor Farjeon, G.K. Chesterton and Eleanor Hull. She drew particularly on Irish authors: W.B. Yeats, George Sigerson, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, Elizabeth Shane, Richard Rowley and John Irvine.
In total, Dorothy wrote over 150 songs for children, and what often distinguishes them is the simplicity of the melodies, as in Wee Hughie, in standard Common Time with only the occasional syncopated note. A second characteristic is their ‘Irishness’, found both in the place names in the verses by John Irvine which Dorothy chose (The Road to Ballydare and Trostan in Song in Exile) and in the character of her melodies. Dorothy’s musical style was that of an earlier age, rather than the experimental novelties of some of her near contemporaries.
Mountains, a source of enjoyment and musical stimulus for Dorothy. For, although outwardly a ‘city girl’ (born in Derry city, lived in Belfast), her musical heart lay in the Irish countryside. In the 1930s, she had frequently set the verses of the Mourne poet, Richard Rowley, but it was a later trip to ‘Yeats country’ in Sligo in 1963 which inspired her composition of The Falling of the Leaves. This is one of Parke’s more elegiac songs, in a melancholy minor key with a complex piano accompaniment. Likewise elegiac, although different in subject matter and in a major key, is the wistful The House and the Road, its flowing melody accompanied by lush chords.
died in a nursing home in Portrush on 15 February 1990. She was buried with Douglas in a family grave with her parents, and her three unnamed infant siblings, in the City of Derry Cemetery on Lone Moor Road. The headstone is plain, grey stone, with the simple inscription ‘Dorothy, wife of Douglas’. No mention that she was also Dorothy Parke, one of Ireland’s most renowned composers.
Dorothy and Douglas rarely travelled abroad, but they had a holiday home in the Mourne
But not all Dorothy’s songs are melancholy, as To the Sailors shows, in its paean of praise for seafarers. Dating from the 1940s, it is imbued with patriotic zeal, with just a passing nod to Elgar. The words were written by the Northern Irish poet John Irvine, with whom Dorothy later collaborated in the publication of her bestknown song cycle, of fifteen songs, By Winding Roads. A recording of the work was made in 1950, and the songs subsequently became favourites on BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour, but the published version did not appear until 1975.
Douglas Brown died suddenly in 1977. By this point Dorothy was no longer composing, and was mainly busy with reprints of her songs, discussions with publishers, and noting performances of her music. Dorothy herself
Dorothy Parke left behind a body of works, particularly songs, that are distinctively Irish. Her lifetime spanned the partition of Ireland, two world wars and the Northern Ireland Troubles, yet her love for, and identification with, the land of her birth is a continuing thread in everything she wrote. She herself traced her love of folk melody and poetry to the Hebrides, to the homeland of her mother and her maternal grandparents. Perhaps, she was, as Tyrone Guthrie once said of himself: ‘a very Irish sort of Anglo-Scot’. And that could be the perennial appeal of Dorothy Parke’s songs.
© 2024 Nuala McAllister Hart
Nuala McAllister Hart is a musician and academic. Her research focuses upon musical life in North-West Ireland about which she has published two books and numerous articles.
Our mother Joan Trimble’s early years, growing up in Enniskillen in an intensely musical family, coupled with academic studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, led her to join her younger sister Valerie at the Royal College of Music in London in the late 1930s. The sisters studied piano with Arthur Benjamin who steered them onto performing duets on two pianos, and their first public performance was in 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis. Joan was also studying composition with Herbert Howells (and was later a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams) and had already been persuaded to write some pieces for the new partnership. What flowed from this was critical acclaim, a contract with publishers Boosey & Hawkes, an introduction to the BBC and many years of broadcast engagements.
Of all our mother’s musical achievements, composition was probably what mattered to her most. But her creative span was curtailed by other demands on her time: writing arrangements for the two-piano partnership with her sister Valerie, as well as practice and performance; teaching and examining; marriage and family life in north London; working as a part-time receptionist for our GP father; and later on, the demands of running a newspaper business in Enniskillen.
Her compositional output lasted only 20 years (1937–57) and a large part of it dates from the first decade. By the time her family began to
grow, the emphasis was on performance and broadcasting. Two pianos were installed in an upstairs bedroom and through the walls the sounds of practice were what I and my sister Caroline heard from next door, as we played in our room. A lot of noise – a vast range of pieces – and quite a bit of bickering! For us, our mother’s creative writing was confined to piano works.
So it’s no surprise that composition became intermittent – and almost non-existent. The last commission she accepted from the BBC was in 1957: Blind Raftery, a one-hour opera for television. She was the first woman to receive such a commission from the BBC and was given three months in which to write it.
‘Mum Writes an Opera’ and ‘Opera Over a Cooking Stove’ were how the newspapers described her task. The press loved the idea of our mother happily writing away surrounded by her young brood. My brother did, indeed, carry out the construction of his aircraft models at the far end of the Music Room as my mother worked at her desk, with the large cream Bakelite phone on top of the piano poised to receive any calls from patients.
What was impressed upon us as a family was the need to support her in this venture. We were a team. Our father presented Joan with a handsome pencil box filled with all the essential implements for crafting operatic jottings.
We children were expected to participate in household chores – bringing in coal, washing up and making beds … We did, of course, have other help but it tended to be a bit haphazard.
And so the opera grew. For the first time we were experiencing the true lyricism of our mother’s creative talent. We were carried along with the intensity of the process, with the comings and goings to the house. We all sang snatches of the arias. I recall Julian Bream calling to advise on guitar fingering for Hilaria’s aria ‘Son ri en los ojos’. And I remember my mother being annoyed that people assumed that songs such as ‘Over the purple hills’ were plucked from traditional Irish folk music and not her original compositions. The only traditional song in the opera is ‘’Tis pretty to be in Ballinderry’.
The opera, which was televised live in April 1957, was a success. But the conditions under which she was obliged to work were not ideal. She realised that to do anything like this again would require her full-time attention and this she just did not have the freedom to give. So composition was put to one side and the twopiano partnership held centre stage until the mid 1970s. Only two further commissions emerged later on: Introduction and Air for Two Harps in 1969 and Three Diversions for Wind Quintet in 1990.
Texts
1 The Road to Ballydare
The night is falling in Gweedara now, The field deserted, and the furrow done, And men go homeward weary from the plough The little lamps are lighted one by one.
The last grey glimmer of the twilight dies, The shadows deepen, and the land is still, A lapwing calling from the quiet skies, The whisper of a wind along the hill.
But I will take the road to Ballydare
Where Padraig waits for me and tunes his strings,
The homely smell of turf is in the air
And far across the moor a fiddle sings.
John Irvine (1903–1964)
2 A Song of Good Courage
They have no fear, whose faith is strong To stand for Right In face of Wrong; And who, whatever may befall, Know that God’s love is over all, In days of good and evil cheer; They have no fear.
They shall prevail, who without cease Did strive to tread the path of Peace, And who, compelled to draw the sword, Go forward in the fear of God, Though every darkest hour assail, They shall prevail.
3 St Columba’s Poem on Derry
Came all Alba’s cess to me, From its centre to its sea, I would choose a better part –One house set in Derry's heart!
Dear for these things Derry fair: Purity and peace are there, Far I bear from Derry’s shore
Quiet peace and lasting love.
Derry mine! my small oak-grove ! Little cell, my home, my love!
O thou Lord of lasting life, Woe to him who brings it strife!
attr. to St Columba (521—597), from ‘Delights in Erinn (ad 563)’, trans. George Sigerson (1836–1925)
© 2024 Joanna McVey
O Thou, to whom all hearts are bare, Receive our prayer, Lord, hear our prayer.
Gunby Hadath (1871–1954)
The County Mayo
4 I. The County Mayo
Now with the coming in of the spring the days will stretch a bit, And after the feast of Brigid I shall hoist my flag and go,
For since the thought got into my head I can neither stand nor sit
Until I find myself in the middle of the county of Mayo.
In Claremorris I would stop a night and sleep with decent men,
And then go on to Balla just beyond and drink galore, And next I’ll go to Kiltimagh for about a month, and then
I would only be a couple of miles from Ballymore.
I say and swear that my heart lifts up like the lifting of a tide, Rising up like the rising wind till fog or mist must go,
When I remember Carra and Gallen close beside, At the Gap of the Two Bushes, and the wide plains of Mayo.
To Killaden then, to the place where everything grows that is best, There are raspberries there and strawberries there and all that is good for men; And were I only there among my folk my heart could rest, For age itself would leave me there and I'd be young again.
James Stephens (1880–1950), after Antoine Ó Raifteiri (1779–1835)
5 II. Inis Fál
Now may we turn aside and dry our tears, And comfort us, and lay aside our fears, For all is gone, all comely quality, All gentleness and hospitality, All courtesy and merriment is gone; Our virtues all are withered every one, Our music vanished and our skill to sing: Now may we quiet us and quit our moan, Nothing is whole that could be broke; nothing Remains to us of all that was our own.
James Stephens
6 III. Peggy Mitchell
As lily grows up easily, In modest, gentle dignity
To sweet perfection, So grew she As easily!
Or as the rose
That knows no care
Will open out, on sunny air Bloom after bloom, Fair after fair, Sweet after sweet; Just so did she As carelessly!
She is our torment without end, She is our enemy, our friend, Our joy, our woe; And she will send Madness or glee
To you or me, And endlessly.
James Stephens
7 IV. In the Poppy Field
Mad Patsy said, he said to me, That every morning he could see An angel walking on the sky; Across the sunny skies of morn
He threw great handfuls far and near Of poppy seed among the corn; And then, he said, the angels run To see the poppies in the sun.
A poppy is a devil weed, I said to him – he disagreed; He said the devil had no hand
In spreading flowers tall and fair In corn and rye and meadow land, By garth and barrow everywhere: The devil has not any flower, But only money in his power.
And then he stretched out in the sun
And rolled upon his back for fun! He kicked his legs and roared for joy
Because the sun was shining down!
He said he was a little boy And would not work for any clown: He ran and laughed behind a bee, And danced for very ecstasy.
James Stephens
8 To the Sailers
On what wild waters do you sail By darkened headlands fringed with foam, Your grey ships passing in the gale The shores around our island home, The deep eternal waters flow And love go with you where you go.
O’er what great oceans vast and wide In tropic heat or winters cold, The splendid ships of battle ride On seas our frigates knew of old, Through driving rain or blinding snow –And love go with you where you go.
Behind what far horizon’s rim
With white gulls screaming in the wake
You pass beyond the twilight dim
On many seas for England’s sake, Nor ever fail her, weal or woe –And love go with you where you go.
John Irvine
9 Wee Hughie
He’s gone to school, wee Hughie,
An’ him not four.
Sure I saw the fright was in him When he left the door.
But he took a hand o’ Denny, An’ a hand o’ Dan, With Joe’s owld coat upon him –Och, the poor wee man.
He cut the quarest figure, More stout nor thin;
An’ trottin’ right an’ steady Wi’ his toes turned in.
I watched him to the corner
O’ the big turf stack,
An’ the more his feet went forrit, Still his head turned back.
He was lookin’ would I call him –Och, my heart was woe –
Sure it’s lost I am without him, But he be to go.
I followed to the turnin’ When they passed it by, God help him, he was cryin’, An’ maybe so was I.
Elizabeth Shane (1877–1951)
10 Song in Exile
There are golden whins on Trostan, There are hawthorns in Glendun, And seaward through the lonely glens The wild Spring waters run.
A thousand thrushes sing there As they have ever sung, And kindly men who work the fields Were lads when I was young.
But I am far from Trostan In sunlight and in rain.
Ah! the winds of Spring will come and go Ere I be there again.
John Irvine
A Honeycomb
11 I. Lesbia
Sweet and delicate and rare,
At the end of a wind-blown, fragrant bough The apple swings: If I, who fly no more, had wings, Or if my wizardry knew how, I'd wing to where that sweetness swings At the end of the bough.
James Stephens
12 II. The Queen of the Bees Bee! tell me, whence do you come?
Ten fields away, twenty perhaps, Have heard your hum.
If you are from the north, you may Have passed my mother’s roof of straw Upon your way.
If you are from the south, you should Have seen another cottage just Inside a wood.
And should you go back that way, please Carry a message to the house Among the trees.
Say – I shall meet her at the rock
Beside the stream, this very night At eight o’clock.
And ask your queen when you get home
To send my queen the present of A honeycomb.
James Stephens 13 III. The Daisies
In the scented bud of the morning – O, When the windy grass went rippling far!
I saw my dear one walking slow, In the field where the daises are.
We did not laugh and we did not speak As we wandered happily to and fro.
I kissed my dear on either cheek, In the bud of the morning – O!
A lark sang up from the breezy land, A lark sang down from the cloud afar, As she and I went hand in hand In the field where the daisies are.
James Stephens
14 IV. The Coolin
Come with me under my coat,
And we will drink our fill
Of the milk of the white goat, Or wine if it be thy will.
And we will talk
Until talk is a trouble too, Out on the side of the hill, And nothing is left to do,
But an eye to look into an eye, And a hand in a hand to slip, And a sigh to answer a sigh, And a lip to find out a lip. What if the night be black, Or the air on the mountain chill! Where the goat lies down in her track And all but the fern is still!
Stay with me, under my coat! And we will drink our fill Of the milk of the white goat, Out on the side of the hill!
James Stephens, after Antoine Ó Raifteiri
15 V. The Canal Bank
I know a girl, And a girl knows me, And the owl says, what? And the owl says, who?
But what we know We both agree That nobody else Shall hear or see, It's all between Herself and we: To wit? said the owl, To woo, said I, To-what! to-wit, to-woo!
James Stephens
16 The Wind from the West Blow high, blow low, O wind from the West; You come from the country I love the best.
O say, have the lilies Yet lifted their heads Above the lake-water
That ripples and spreads?
Do the little sedges
Still shake with delight, And whisper together All through the night?
Have the mountains the purple I used to love, And peace about them, Around and above?
Ella Young (1867–1956)
17
Weathers
This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at ‘The Traveller’s Rest’, And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I.
This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I; When beeches drip in browns and duns, And thresh and ply; And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe, And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
18 Son ri en los ojos
Son ri en los ojos
Nos pagan por esolos,
Los labios tan rojos Os piden un beso.
Ah! Hark to the meaning of it: Our faces are smiling, For that we are paid, Our eyes are beguiling, For that is our trade. Whatever befall us
We play us a stone in our heart: For God up above us Is merciful yet, He promised to love us, He will not forget.
Cedric Cliffe (1902–1969) 19 Kilkeel
Up in the mountains, lookin’ on the sea, If I was home again, it’s there I’d be; Far from the dark city’s noisy loom and wheel, Up in the mountains above Kilkeel.
Och! when you left me it’s proud you were and high,
Scorn on your red lip and anger in your eye; Little did I think then the lonesome I’d feel, Far from the mountains, far from Kilkeel.
Thrawn folk are lovers, foolish lad and lass, But won’t your heart be kind again as the days pass;
Send the one word to me, I’ll turn upon my heel And seek you in the mountains above Kilkeel.
20 Moon Magic
A young moon comes with silver feet, And passing down the quiet street, Upon the roadway, still and white She spills her pools of silver light. By meadows where the plovers call She wanders in a silver shawl.
Along the thatch, among the trees
Spreading her silver tapestries
Till every wooded place is made
A fairyland of light and shade; And houses in the hamlet seem Like castles in a land of dream.
John Irvine
21 Sing heigh-ho!
There sits a bird on every tree; Sing heigh-ho!
And courts his love as I do thee; Young maids must marry.
There grows a flower on every bough; Sing heigh-ho!
Its petals kiss – I'll show you how: Young maids must marry.
The sun’s a bridegroom, earth a bride; Sing heigh-ho!
They court from morn till eventide: The earth shall pass, but love abide. Young maids must marry.
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875)
22 Has sorrow thy young days shaded? Has sorrow thy young days shaded As clouds o’er the morning fleet?
Too soon have those young days faded, That even in sorrow were sweet.
Does Time with his cold wing wither Each feeling that once was dear? Come, child of misfortune, come hither, I’ll weep with thee, tear for tear.
Has hope, like the bird in the story, That flitted from tree to tree With the talisman’s glittering glory –Has hope been that bird to thee?
On branch after branch alighting, The gem did she still display, And, when nearest, and most inviting, Then waft the fair gem away?
If thus the sweet hours have fleeted, When sorrow herself looked bright; If thus the fond hope has cheated, That led thee along so light; If thus the unkind world wither Each feeling that once was dear –Come, child of misfortune, come hither, I’ll weep with thee, tear for tear.
Thomas Moore (1780–1852)
23 A Cradle Song
O men from the fields! Come gently within.
Richard Rowley (Richard Valentine Williams, 1877–1947)
Tread softly, softly O men coming in.
Mavourneen is going
From me and from you, Where Mary will fold him With mantle of blue!
From reek of the smoke And cold of the floor And the peering of things Across the half-door.
O men of the fields, Soft, softly come thro’. Mary puts round him Her mantle of blue.
Padraic Colum (1881–1972)
24 Over the purple hills
It is life with you, my Patrick, ’tis all I ask, And the wanderlust I think is in my blood, Over the purple hills to the lone white village, Down by the peaty rill the thin strips of tillage;
Wind on our face by day, night on a bed of heather:
This is the rovers’ way, this is our road together.
Cedric Cliffe
25 The House and the Road
The little road says go, The little house says stay: And oh it’s bonny here at home, But I must go away.
The little road, like me, Would seek and turn and know; And forth I must, to learn the things The little road would show!
And go I must, my dears, And journey while I may, Though heart be sore for the little house That had no word but stay.
Josephine
Preston Peabody (1874–1922)
26 The Falling of the Leaves
Autumn is over the long leaves that love us, And over the mice in the barley sheaves; Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us, And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
The hour of the waning of love has beset us, And weary and worn are our sad souls now; Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us, With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
27 The Fairies
Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home, They live on crispy pancakes Of yellow tide-foam; Some in the reeds Of the black mountain-lake, With frogs for their watchdogs, All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old king sits; He is now so old and grey He’s nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columkill he crosses, On his stately journeys
From Slieve League to the Rosses; Or going up with music On cold starry nights, To sup with the Queen Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget For seven years long; And when she came down again Her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back, Between the night and morrow, They thought that she was fast asleep, But she was dead with sorrow. They have kept her ever since Deep within the lake, On a bed of flag-leaves, Watching till she wake.
William Allingham (1824–1889)
28 A Wanderer’s Song
A wind’s in the heart of me, a fire’s in my heels, I am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;
I hunger for the sea’s edge, the limit of the land, Where the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.
Oh I’ll be going, leaving the noises of the street, To where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;
To a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,
Oh I’ll be going, going, until I meet the tide.
And first I’ll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,
The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,
The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,
And then the heart of me’ll know I’m there or thereabout.
Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,
For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;
And I’ll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,
For a wind’s in the heart of me, a fire’s in my heels.
John Masefield (1878–1967)
After graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Carolyn Dobbin was Associate Artist at Welsh National Opera and a soloist in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Recently she performed Marquise of Berkenfield in La fille du régiment and Lene in La ciociara for Wexford Festival Opera, Cornelia in Giulio Cesare for ETO and Mary in Der fliegende Holländer with Sir Bryn Terfel at Grange Park, a role she will repeat for Irish National Opera in 2025. Upcoming performances include Siegrune in Die Walküre for Longborough Festival, Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas with AKAMUS Baroque Orchestra and Christian Curnyn in Berlin, Mistress Quickly in Falstaff, Dvořák Stabat Mater with the Ulster Orchestra and Jac van Steen, Madam Larina in Eugene Onegin for OperaNI and a recording of Charles Wood songs with Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside for Delphian Records (DCD34339, release date April 2025).
Other CDs include Calen-o for Delphian (DCD34187), A Song More Silent with the London Mozart Players, Ethel Smyth’s Fête Galante conducted by Odeline de la Martinez and Loder’s Raymond and Agnes conducted by Richard Bonynge for Retrospect Opera and the CD/book Fräulein Bixel und Herr Glück for Gossau, Zurich.
Edinburgh Festival, Ludlow Song Festival, English National Opera, Irish National Opera, NIopera, Luzerner Theatre, Grange Park Opera, Southbank Sinfonia in Italy, Opera Holland Park, Stadttheater Bern Switzerland, the Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican, Royal Festival Hall, Dorset Opera and Capella Cracoviensis in Poland.
radio and TV, notably as host of BBC R3’s acclaimed Voices series. In addition to a long association with London’s Guildhall School, Iain is Visiting International Artist at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin. He is Artistic Director of the Ludlow English Song Weekend and Artistic Consultant to Grange Park Opera, Surrey.
She has performed with RTVE Madrid, BBC TV and Radio3, RTÉ, Operavision, ARTtv and Swiss radio, the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre,
Thanks to prolific careers both as pianist and award-winning broadcaster, Iain Burnside is one of the UK’s best-known musicians.
Iain has worked with a huge number of international singers, notably Dame Margaret Price, Rosa Feola, Ailish Tynan, Joyce DiDonato, Laurence Brownlee, Roderick Williams and Bryn Terfel, among many others. He has recorded more than 60 CDs, including sixteen titles on the Delphian label, often created around neglected composers, where his curatorial skills are displayed to the full. He is a great champion of young singers, playing a crucial role in introducing them to a wider audience. In 2022 he took on an additional role, as founding member of Trio Balthasar, alongside violinist Michael Foyle and cellist Tim Hugh.
Innovative programme planning has led Iain to expand his concert work into a hybrid form of music theatre, creating staged work around Brahms (Shining Armour), Wagner (The View from the Villa) and Gurney (A Soldier and a Maker). He has broadcast extensively on both
Future projects include a Rachmaninov Song Series at Wigmore Hall, a Wigmore recital with Roderick Williams which will be broadcast live as part of BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert Series, a recital in Zurich with Rosa Feola and concerts with Trio Balthasar in Italy and Belgium.
Magdeburg, where she will return in the upcoming season for three further role debuts. A sought-after recitalist, Amy has performed in multiple venues across Ireland, the UK and Germany. She most notably made her French debut in a broadcast for Radio France performing a modern composition by celebrated Irish composer, Michael Gallan, of new pieces sung in both English and the native Irish language, Gaeilge.
Amy Ní Fhearraigh is a lyric soprano lauded for her ‘captivating’, ‘versatile and powerful’ voice. Originally from Dublin, where she received her BMus from the Conservatory of Music and Drama, she is now working and based in Germany. A regular on the Irish stages, she made her debut with Irish National Opera in their inaugural production in 2018 and has been involved in numerous productions ever since. Held in high regard in both classical and contemporary opera, she made her Royal Opera House debut in 2023 at the Linbury Theatre where she garnered unanimous rave reviews. One review from The Arts Desk wrote, ‘how impressive [...] to see so totally finessed a performance from a young rising star.’ Following that she made her German debut in Le nozze di Figaro playing the Contessa with Theater
A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, accomplished pianist and chamber musician Ingrid Sawers is equally at home collaborating in instrumental and vocal repertoire, and has performed at both the Oxford Lieder Festival and the World Saxophone Congress, as well as numerous venues throughout the UK, Europe and in Canada. She has partnered many fine musicians either in concert or live BBC broadcast, including Nicky Spence, Lorna Anderson, Janis Kelly, Iestyn Davies and Nicholas Mulroy. She is a passionate advocate for new music, having premiered works by composers including Judith Bingham, Graham Fitkin, Martin Butler and Thomas Adès, but equally delights in established repertoire and rediscovering pieces from archive research. Her teachers included Roger Vignoles, Malcolm Martineau and Paul Hamburger and she now runs a thriving teaching and coaching studio, travels worldwide as an examiner and coaches at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Calen-o: Songs from the North of Ireland
Carolyn Dobbin, Iain Burnside
DCD34187
A passionate advocate for the art music of her native Northern Ireland, mezzo-soprano Carolyn Dobbin has put together this programme that attests to a rich yet little-known tradition. Who knew that doyen of Anglican church music Charles Wood was in fact an Ulsterman, and a fine composer of art song? Premiere recordings of Wood and of the forward-looking Hamilton Harty are interleaved with songs by Joan Trimble and Howard Ferguson in a journey of delightful discovery.
‘With her rich palette of tone and colour, Dobbin knows how to communicate text and music, while Iain Burnside’s accompaniments are beautifully managed. Both voice and piano are finely captured and well balanced’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2018
I and Silence: Women’s Voices in American Song
Lieberson –Argento – Barber – Copland – Crumb
Marta Fontanals-Simmons mezzo-soprano, Lana Bode piano DCD34229
The expectations of silence often placed on women historically and politically, and music’s power to break through them, are the themes of this deeply personal recital. Channelling the voices of female writers and musicians, Fontanals-Simmons and Bode include two works – Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf and Peter Lieberson’s Rilke Songs – which were written for great mezzo-sopranos of the recent past, Dame Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, while settings of Emily Dickinson and Sara Teasdale fill out a programme which meditates powerfully on loss, vulnerability, tenacity and mindfulness.
‘Solid vocal production and excellent diction … [Fontanals-Simmons] prefers the words and music to do the talking, and they do so eloquently’
— BBC Music Magazine, October 2019
Ina Boyle: Songs
Paula Murrihy, Robin Tritschler, Ben McAteer; Iain Burnside piano DCD34264
In lifelong seclusion in rural County Wicklow, Ina Boyle created a legacy of song – tender, often melancholy, illuminated by an exquisite sense for harmony. ‘I think it is most courageous of you to go on with such little recognition,’ wrote Vaughan Williams to his pupil. ‘The only thing to say is that it does come finally.’
Amid the 2020 pandemic, Iain Burnside gathered three superb Irish singers at London’s Wigmore Hall. Recorded in less than five hours, the resulting 80 minutes of music unveil a composer who is one of Ireland’s ‘invisible heroines’. Half a century after Boyle’s death, is Vaughan Williams’s prediction at last coming true?
‘Ina Boyle could scarcely have wished for better advocacy than her songs receive here’ — MusicWeb International, September 2021
From a city window: songs by Hubert Parry
Ailish Tynan, Susan Bickley, William Dazeley; Iain Burnside piano DCD34117
Recorded in the music room of Hubert Parry’s boyhood home, Highnam Court in Gloucestershire, this disc sees three of our finest singers shed illuminating light on an area of the repertoire that has rarely graced the concert hall in recent times. Iain Burnside and his singers rediscover what has been forgotten by historical accident – and what a treasure chest of song they have found! These beautiful performances return Parry’s songs to the heart of his output, where the composer always felt they belonged.
‘The emotional range of these songs, almost faultlessly conceived in terms of textual rhythm, reminds us of just how expert a song-writer and pioneer of the English art Parry was ... The performances are exquisite’ — Gramophone, April 2013
PRESTO Editor’s choice
