Charles Wood (
1866 – 1926 )
songs for voice and piano
1 O Captain! my Captain! rw *
5 Oh! Skylark, for thy wing! cd *
6 The Ride of the Witch cd, rw
To Music cd, rw *
CAROLYN DOBBIN mezzo-soprano
IAIN BURNSIDE piano
RODERICK WILLIAMS baritone
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. Thanks also to Paul at Delphian Records for believing in these projects, to Iain Burnside for his world-class playing and support, to the super-talented Roderick Williams for his time and endless cheerfulness, to my idol Jeremy Dibble for his insightful contributions, and to Gordon Cree, Madeleine Pierard and Aeron Preston for their fantastic typesetting. I’d also like to thank Caius College Cambridge, the RCM, CMC and the British Library for their help and access to their archives and to those who have donated or left music to me over the years. — Carolyn Dobbin
Recorded on 8-10 January 2024 and 25-27 March 2017 (tracks 17-21) in St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway model D, serial no. 600443 (2015)
Piano technician: Norman Motion
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: Henry Howard
Cover photography: Frances Marshall
Session photography: William Coates-Gibson/ Foxbrush
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
Though Charles Wood is best known for his music for the Anglican liturgy, he was a much more versatile composer than is often recognised. His early career witnessed the production of numerous instrumental works including an overture, a piano concerto and a septet; indeed, throughout his career he retained a fascination for the idiom of the string quartet where he evidently sought some kind of intellectual and creative sanctuary. There were also a few large-scale orchestral and choral works, incidental music for Greek plays, an unfinished opera and two one-act operas, but the most substantial focus of his energy was the production of secular vocal music in the form of solo songs, partsongs and arrangements of Irish folksong. Wood’s upbringing in Ulster was shaped by his years as a chorister in Armagh’s Church of Ireland cathedral and the musical household to which he belonged; and, like his Dublinborn compatriot and teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford, he was profoundly influenced by the Irish cultural revival and the promotion of traditional melody, and he retained a powerful interest in its promulgation and popularisation, reflected by his later membership of the Irish Folk Song Society and by his keen interest in antiquarianism.
Wood began writing solo songs while still a student at the Royal College of Music, an institution which first opened its doors in 1883 with Wood himself as the first recipient
of the Morley Scholarship in Composition. Wood doubtless found the words of Felicia Hemans’ Oh! Skylark, for thy wing!, first published in 1832, in the 1875 publication of Hemans’ complete poetry. Completed on 7 January 1884, during his first year under the watchful eye of Stanford, the song already shows an admirable understanding of the techniques his teacher looked eagerly to inculcate in his pupils. From Hemans’ poem of six verses, Wood conceived his structure in the three longer strophes, perhaps persuaded by the ‘refrain’ which concludes the first and third. Each strophe is also deftly altered harmonically or rhythmically to suit the sentiment of the text (note the open-ended nature of the second strophe, for example).
The student Wood continued to write songs. A full-blooded setting of Thomas Moore’s wellknown At the mid hour of night (composed in 1886 but remained unpublished until 1927) demonstrated his rapidly expanding harmonic vocabulary and a genuine romantic sensibility which, in its almost Brahmsian aura of autumnal melancholy, was equal to Moore’s outpouring of lost love. Wood also made three settings of poems by Tennyson, no doubt with the endorsement of Stanford who set Tennyson’s words extensively. Ask me no more, bearing the date 21 September 1886, was taken from the Poet Laureate’s collection, The Princess. It was first sung at the Royal College of Music on 25 November 1886
by the soprano Anna Russell. More tonally ambitious, the song demonstrates how far the young Wood had come after three years of study. Moreover, the structure of the song is more subtle, particularly in the way the second and more dramatic third verses are elided and the innate plangency of the song is communicated in the postlude for piano. For Fortune and her Wheel, perhaps better known as ‘Song from the Marriage of Geraint’ from Idylls of the King, Wood makes fertile use of imagery in the perpetual rising and falling motion of the triplet accompaniment, and, once again, the last two verses (the third refuses to cadence) reveal a degree of legerdemain in their understated elision.
After the Tennyson songs came three settings of Christina Rossetti in 1887, all of which also remained in manuscript until 1927. Shall I forget was published in Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems of 1866 and reflects the persistent Victorian preoccupation, indeed anxiety, concerning death and the afterlife. The appeal of the potently spiritual yet inquisitorial nature of Rossetti’s verse was probably the same as that which drew Wood to the poetry of Walt Whitman. Early surviving sketches suggest that he harboured an attraction to Whitman’s art while he was a student, one which may have been nourished by Stanford’s pioneering Elegiac Ode written for the Norwich Festival in 1884 and which Wood could conceivably have heard there. It was not
until 1891, however, after he had accepted an organ scholarship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, that he seriously turned to Whitman’s words.
The first of Wood’s Whitman settings was Darest thou now, O soul (from the section ‘Whispers of heavenly death’ in Leaves of Grass), most likely the earliest setting of a text which proved enormously popular with some of Wood’s contemporaries (Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Holst) and many others throughout the twentieth century. Like many of his compositions, it remained unpublished during his lifetime and did not see print until 1927 when it was included in Boosey & Hawkes’ Ten Songs for Low Voice. Couched in a lush D flat major, it expresses Whitman’s transcendental mysticism through a language of muscular diatonicism tinged with moments of elusive chromaticism (as in the line ‘toward the unknown region’). The sense of mystery is also enhanced by the voice’s lack of cadence at the end of each verse, requiring the piano to provide the continuity and closure. Only with the fourth verse (‘Till, when the ties loosen’) does Wood fittingly make a tonal divergence, and this provides a stirring transition to the climax of the final verse, the recapitulation of the main melody (‘Then we burst forth’) and a high F for the final declamatory statement (‘O soul’). A second Whitman song, using a Civil War poem By the bivouac’s fitful flame (from Drum Taps), is dated 30 August 1897
and may well be the earliest setting of this text (in anticipation of others by composers such as Harty and Bliss). It was first sung at a recital at St James’s Hall in London by the young baritone, Edward Iles on 19 April 1901 with Wood at the piano. Still unpublished, this impressive, almost scena-like song, full of tonal interest, has a dramatic strength and force engendered by the robust vocal line, its accompaniment highly suggestive of the orchestra. From Whitman’s poem of ten lines, Wood created a two-strophe musical structure in which the more concentrated second strophe functions as a radical variation of the first in its momentary hushed divergence from D flat major to D major (‘and of those that are far away’), anticipating the whispered conclusion which the composer marks ‘ppp’.
Two more Whitman songs appeared in 1898, both dated 28 February, which were subsequently published by Boosey. Deeply moved by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Whitman wrote his poem O Captain! my Captain! in 1865 and it became one of his most famous verses both in America and abroad. The form of Whitman’s three verses (with a rhyming scheme rare in the poet’s work) is of four lines and a refrain, also of four lines. This helped shape Wood’s interpretation. Each verse is marked ‘Allegro molto moderato’ and is cast in B flat major, while the more solemn, dirge-like music of the refrain, which also opens the song, is slower (‘Andante sostenuto’) and
in the minor mode. The remarkable Ethiopia Saluting the Colours is perhaps Wood’s finest secular canvas. The scene, from the ‘Carolinas Campaign’ of 1864, depicts General Sherman’s Union soldiers as they file past, bemused by the brightly turbaned slave woman who gladly salutes the American flag (a symbol of her emancipation). The song is appropriately a brisk march in A flat whose perpetual bass motion is temporarily interrupted by Ethiopia’s faltering retort (‘Me, master’), one which relates her cruel history in a more emotive context of tonal fluidity. According to Harry Plunket Greene, who remained a passionate advocate of ‘Ethiopia’ (it featured prominently in his book Interpretation in Song), it was Stanford who unearthed the song in Wood’s teaching room at the RCM. It was often performed by Plunket Greene (as well as other leading baritones such as Frederic Austin), and also became well known in the composer’s orchestration which was first given a the Hovingham Festival (in north Yorkshire) on 12 July 1899.
In the same year as the composition of ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ and ‘Ethiopia’, Wood completed a setting by the Irish poet, Jeremiah Jospeh Callanan, who died tragically young at the age of 33 in Portugal from tuberculosis. From around 1823 until his death, he spent much time collecting old ballads and legends in Ireland, which he translated into English. Callanan’s most popular poem, The Outlaw of Loch Lene has a romantic sense of tragedy
and distance which seems almost reminiscent of Eichendorff in its use of nature, sounds and symbols, elements to which Wood responded in a turbulent interpretation which ends with a poetical tranquillity.
Sharing Stanford’s profound love of Irish folksong, Wood arranged a considerable number of melodies for solo voice. For his first published collection published in 1897, Irish Folk Songs, which was dedicated to Stanford, he collaborated with Alfred Perceval Graves who had provided the words for Stanford’s Songs of Old Ireland (1882) and Irish Songs and Ballads (1893), and he would also have been thoroughly aware of Stanford’s inventive arrangements of Moore’s Melodies Restored which appeared in 1895. Wood’s approach to the method of arrangement is romantic and bold, as is evident in the lament Beside the River Loune, the amorous I’d roam the world over with you, the mournful Credhe’s Lament for Cail and The Enchanted Valley, whose harmonic artifice, notably with the use of the augmented sixth chord, instils a questioning pang of caution and regret. In The Blackberry Blossom, he was able to inculcate a touching sense of nostalgia and unrequited love, especially in the slower conclusion. The gentle air O love, ’tis a calm starry night, is, by contrast, simpler in texture and harmony, as is the melancholy jig, Over here. In addition to his arrangements of Irish melody, Wood also composed several
art songs to words by Irish poets, foremost among whom was Moira O’Neill (the pseudonym of Agnes Shakespear Higginson). Four settings from Songs of the Glens of Antrim, which had a special Ulster resonance, were published posthumously in 1927 as part of Boosey’s collection of Ten Songs for Low Voice. A journey through the passing seasons, symbolised by the storm thrush, song thrush, cushadoo (wood pigeon) and robin, provides the focus of Birds; an amusing patter song in the style of an Irish jig, The Sailor Man tells of how long sea voyages make one’s heart long for the girls at home; Denny’s Daughter (which Stanford set with great sensitivity), a heartfelt elegy, is particularly affecting in the manner in which Wood shifts metrically from 3/4 to 2/4 and tonally from B flat major to D major for the second half of his two verses, particularly in the second verse where a further modulation to D flat intensifies the feeling of loss and loneliness, while At Sea (also set very effectively by Stanford) is a perfervid lyric, expressing something of the poet’s nostalgia for the Antrim coast and its adjoining landscape through Wood’s rich matrix of modulation.
Admired as probably the supreme contrapuntist of his generation, Charles Wood loved the seemingly effortless discipline and musical stringency of canon in his music, which can be found across the range of genres which he touched (his partsong Come, sleep is a particularly fine example). In 1913 he produced
Notes on the music
a series of at least nine canons ‘in two’ for two voices and piano accompaniment, ideal for either children or adults, which were published by the Year Book Press, a publisher with which Wood had a close association for the rest of his life. For To Music (Canon 2), using the first and third verses of Robert Herrick’s poem ‘To music, to becalm his fever’, Wood’s answering canonic voice, at a bar’s length, is al rovescio (in inversion) and takes the form of a charming lullaby in triple time. The Ride of the Witch (Canon 5), also from a poem, ‘The Hag’, by Herrick, written at a time when early seventeenth-century society was obsessed with witches and witch-burning, is a more traditional canon at the unison (also at a bar’s length) which conveys an unsettling sense of trepidation at the thought of the midnight witch on her broomstick.
© 2024 Jeremy Dibble
Jeremy Dibble is Emeritus Professor of Music at Durham University. He is a specialist in British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has published monographs on Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, John Stainer, Michele Esposito and Hamilton Harty.
More recently he has edited a book on British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850–1850 and a monograph on the music of Frederick Delius as well as essays on Frank Bridge, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. He is also musical editor of the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. Forthcoming projects include books on Charles Wood, Stanford, ColeridgeTaylor and William Alwyn.
Texts
1 O Captain! my Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths – for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)
2 The Sailor Man
Sure a terrible time I was out o’ the way, Over the sea, over the sea,
Till I come back to Ireland one sunny day, Betther for me, betther for me.
The first time me foot got the feel o’ the ground
I was sthrollin’ along in an Irish city,
That hasn’t its aquil the world around For the air that is sweet an’ the girls that are pretty.
Light on their feet now they passed me an’ sped,
Give you me word, give you me word, Every girl wid a turn o’ the head
Just like a bird, just like a bird; An’ the lashes so thick round their beautiful eyes
Shinin’ to tell you it’s fair time o’ day wid them,
Back in my heart wid a kind of surprise
I think how the Irish girls has the way wid them!
Och man alive! But it’s little ye know
That never was there, never was there. Look where ye like for them, long may ye go –What do I care? what do I care?
Plenty as blackberries where will ye find Rare pretty girls not by two nor by three o’ them?
Only just there where they grow, d’ye mind
Still like the blackberries, more than ye see o’ them.
Long, long away an’ no matther how far, ’Tis the girls that I miss, the girls that I miss: Women are round ye wherever ye are Not worth a kiss, not worth a kiss.
Over in Ireland many’s the one –Well do I know, that has nothin’ to say wid them –
Sweeter than anythin’ undher the sun.
Och, ’tis the Irish girls has the way wid them!
Moira O’Neill (Agnes Shakespear Higginson, 1864–1955)
3 Birds
Sure maybe ye’ve heard the storm-thrush
Whistlin’ bould in March,
Before there’s a primrose peepin’ out, Or a wee red cone on the larch; Whistlin’ the sun to come out o’ the cloud, An’ the wind to come over the sea, But for all he can whistle so clear an’ loud, He’s never the bird for me.
Sure maybe ye’ve seen the song-thrush
After an April rain
Slip from in-undher the drippin’ leaves, Wishful to sing again;
An’ low wi’ love when he’s near the nest,
An’ loud from the top o’ the tree,
But for all he can flutter the heart in your breast, He’s never the bird for me.
Sure maybe ye’ve heard the cushadoo
Callin’ his mate in May, When one sweet thought is the whole of his life,
An’ he tells it the one sweet way. But my heart is sore at the cushadoo
Filled wid his own soft glee, Over an’ over his ‘me an’ you!’ He’s never the bird for me.
Sure maybe ye’ve heard the red-breast Singin’ his lone on a thorn, Mindin’ himself o’ the dear days lost, Brave wid his heart forlorn.
The time is in dark November, An’ no spring hopes has he: ‘Remember,’ he sings, ‘remember!’ Ay, thon’s the wee bird for me.
Moira O’Neill
4 The Blackberry Blossom
When I was but a weeshy boy, My mother’s pride, my father’s joy, My mouth and hands had full employ, When blackberries grew ripe; And oft my mammy she should squeeze The thorns from out my arms and knees, And my good dad, to give me ease, Put by his favourite pipe. And even since I’ve become a man, And dressed on quite a different plan, I’ve still gone carrying the can, When blackberries grew sweet. Yes! trampling through the bramble brakes,
I’d court the keenest pains and aches For two or three fair colleens’ sakes, Whose names I’ll not repeat.
Till Norah of the amber hair, Who’d been my partner here and there, Around about and everywhere, When blackberries came in; When I just tried with too much haste
The richer, rarer fruit to taste, That on her lips was goin’ to waste, She tosses up her chin, And marches by me night and morn, Her grey eyes only glancing scorn, Regardless of the bitter thorn That in my heart she’s rooting! Yet, somehow, something in my mind Keeps murmuring, when she’s most unkind, ‘Have patience! she’ll make friends, you’ll find, Ere blackberries finish fruiting!’
Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931)
5 Oh! Skylark, for thy wing!
Oh! Skylark, for thy wing! Thou bird of joy and light, That I might soar and sing At Heaven’s empyreal height! With the heath’ry hills beneath me, Whence the streams in glory spring, And the pearly clouds to wreath me –Oh, Skylark! on thy wing!
Through the blue divinely clear, Where the low mists cannot rise!
And a thousand joyous measures From my chainless heart should spring, Like the bright rain’s vernal treasures, As I wander’d on thy wing.
But oh! the silver cords, That around the heart are spun, From gentle tones and words, And kind eyes that make our sun! To some low sweet nest returning, How soon my love would bring, There, there the dews of morning, Oh, Skylark! on thy wing!
Felicia
Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835)
6 The Ride of the Witch
The hag is astride, This night for to ride; The devil and she together: Through thick, and through thin, Now out, and then in, Though ne’er so foule be the weather.
A thorn or a burr
She takes for a spur; With a lash of a bramble she rides now, Through brakes and through bryars, O’er ditches and mires, She follows the spirit that guides now.
Free, free from earth-born fear, I would range the blessed skies,
No beast, for his food, Dares now range the wood; But hushed in his lair he lies lurking,
While mischiefs by these, On land and on seas, At noon of night are a-working.
The storm will arise And trouble the skies
This night, and more for the wonder, The ghost from the tomb Affrighted shall come, Called out by the clap of the Thunder.
Robert Herrick (1591–1674), ‘The Hag’
7 The Enchanted Valley
I would go where lilies blow Beside the flow of languid streams, Within that vale of opal glow, Where bright-winged dreams flutter to and fro Fain am I its magic peace to know.
Oh beware of that valley fair!
All dwellers there to phantoms turn; For joys and grief they have none to share And ever they yearn life’s burden still to bear Ah! of that valley beware! Beware!
Alfred Perceval Graves
8 Fortune and her Wheel
Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the proud;
Turn thy wild wheel thro’ sunshine, storm, and cloud;
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown;
With that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.
Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands; For man is man and master of his fate.
Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd; Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
9 Over here
Oh, the praties they grow small, Over here, over here.
Oh, the praties they grow small And we dig them in the fall. And we ate them coats and all, Over here, over here.
Oh, I wish we all were geese, Night and morn, night and morn!
Oh, I wish we all were geese, For they live and die at peace, Till the hour of their decease, Eating corn, eating corn.
Oh, we’re down into the dust, Over here, over here, Oh, we’re down into the dust, But the God in whom we trust Will yet give us crumb for crust, Over here, over here. praties – potatoes
Alfred Perceval Graves, after an Irish song
10 Ethiopia Saluting the Colours
‘Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet?
Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?’
(‘Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines,
Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com’st to me,
As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)
‘Me, master, years a hundred since, from my parents sunder’d,
A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,
Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.’
No further does she say, but lingering all the day,
Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.
‘What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?
Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red, and green?
Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?’
11 I’d roam the world over with you
‘I’d roam the world over and over with you, O, Swan-neck and Lark-voice and Swallow-inshoe,
My Violets and Lilies and Rose without rue, I’d roam the world over and over with you.’
‘If I roamed the world over, fond lover, with you,
And we met the rude mountains, now, what should we do?’
‘They would smooth themselves straight at one stroke of your shoe
And I’d course their crests over and over with you.’
‘My fond, foolish lover, still roaming with you, To cross the rough river, now what should I do?’
‘To one great, shallow glass it would shrink from your shoe, And admire, and admire, and admire you step through.’
‘But ah! If still roaming, rash lover, with you, I reached the dread desert, say, what could I do?’
‘Your breath of soft balm would the wilderness woo
To break into blossom so heavenly of hue
That we’d rest at long last from our roaming, aroo!’
Alfred Perceval Graves
Walt Whitman
12 Darest thou now, O soul
Darest thou now, O soul, Walk out with me toward the unknown region, Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow?
No map, there, nor guide, Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand, Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
I know it not, O soul; Nor dost thou – all is a blank before us; All waits, undream’d of, in that region – that inaccessible land.
Till, when the ties loosen, All but the ties eternal, Time and Space, Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds, bounding us.
Then we burst forth – we float, In Time and Space, O soul – prepared for them; Equal, equipt at last – (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O soul.
Walt Whitman
13 Denny’s Daughter
Denny’s daughter stood a minute in the field
I be to pass,
All as quiet as her shadow lyin’ by her on the grass;
In her hand a switch o’ hazel from the nut tree’s crooked root, Well I mind the crown o’ clover crumpled undher one bare foot.
For the look of her,
The look of her
Comes back on me to-day, –Wi’ the eyes of her, The eyes of her
That took me on the way.
Though I seen poor Denny’s daughter white an’ stiff upon her bed, Yet I be to think there’s sunlight fallin’ somewhere on her head:
She’ll be singin’ Ave Mary where the flowers never wilt,
She, the girl my own hands covered wi’ the narrow daisy-quilt.
For the love of her, The love of her
That would not be my wife: An’ the loss of her, The loss of her Has left me lone for life.
Moira O’Neill
14 Beside the River Loune
Nevermore, where yon ash is weeping, Old and hoar, over Loune, Nevermore shall my heart go leaping At the glance of her gown.
Shall I hear my love’s voice kindly calling Her ‘Come home!’ to the cows.
O’er our tryst by the lone Loune Water, At the Ford of the Sloes, Crept the mist, while the wild, brown water In anger arose.
Step by step, each ford-stone seeking She shimmered at my side; But a sudden spate, it swept her, shrieking, Down the red, raging tide.
All night with the flood-fiend wrestling I sought her forlorn
Till amid the blue forget-me-not nestling I found her at morn.
Like a maiden of marble moulded, All at peace my love lay there, With her hands upon her bosom folded, Meekly folded in prayer.
Alfred Perceval Graves
15 By the bivouac’s fitful flame
By the bivouac’s fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow – but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields’ and woods’ dim outline, The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground, By the bivouac’s fitful flame.
Walt Whitman
16 O love, ’tis a calm starry night
O love, ‘tis a calm starry night; No breath stirs the leaves below; My steed is at the door, And my ship is at the shore, Then come down to me, my darling, and away, away we’ll go; Then come down and far, and far away we’ll go.
Your guardian is sleeping above, Base churl, with his taunt and blow!
The house is all at rest
Only you that I love best, Like a busy mouse keep rustling to and fro, and to and fro
To make ready still keep rustling to and fro.
Now soft you come stealing down the stair!
My heart it is all in a glow;
O stay your silent tears!
O cease your maiden fears!
For the world’s wealth I’d never from you go, or work you woe
For the world’s wealth how could I use you so?
Nevermore, when snowflakes falling Blanch the wrinkled, writhing boughs,
The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
Alfred Perceval Graves, after an Irish ballad
17 At the mid hour of night
At the mid hour of night when stars are weeping, fly
To the lonely vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye;
And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the region of air,
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,
And tell me our love is remembered even in the sky.
Then I sing the wild song it once was rapture to hear,
When our voices commingling breathed like one on the ear,
And as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls,
I think, oh my love! ’tis thy voice from the kingdom of souls
Faintly answering still the notes which once were so dear.
Thomas Moore (1779–1852)
18 At Sea
’Tis the long blue Head o’ Garron From the sea,
Och, we’re sailin’ past the Garron On the sea.
Now Glen Ariff lies behind, Where the waters fall an’ wind
By the willows o’ Glen Ariff to the sea.
Ould Luirgedan rises green By the sea
Ay, he stands between the Glens
An’ the sea.
Now we’re past the darklin’ caves, Where the breakin’ summer waves Wander in wi’ their trouble from the sea.
But Cushendun lies nearer To the sea,
An’ thon’s a shore is dearer
Still to me,
For the land that I am leavin’
Sure the heart I have is grievin’, But the ship has set her sails for the sea.
Och, what’s this is deeper Than the sea?
An’ what’s this is stronger Nor the sea?
When the call is ‘all or none’,
An’ the answer ‘all for one’
Then we be to sail away across the sea.
Moira O’Neill
19 Shall I forget
Shall I forget on this side of the grave?
I promise nothing: you must wait and see, Patient and brave.
(O my soul, watch with him and he with me.)
Faithful and wise.
(O my soul, lead the way he walks with me.)
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
The maid of my heart, my fair one of Heaven resides:
I think, as at eve she wanders its mazes among, The birds go to sleep by the sweet wild twist of her song.
Shall I forget in peace of Paradise?
I promise nothing: follow, friend, and see,
20 The Outlaw of Loch Lene
O many a day have I made good ale in the glen, That came not of stream or malt, like the brewing of men:
My bed was the ground; my roof, the greenwood above;
And the wealth that I sought, one far kind glance from my love.
Alas! on that night when the horses I drove from the field,
That I was not near from terror my angel to shield!
She stretch’d forth her arms; her mantle she flung to the wind,
And swam o’er Loch Lene, her outlaw’d lover to find.
O would that a freezing sleet-wing’d tempest did sweep,
And I and my love were alone, far off on the deep;
I’d ask not a ship, or a bark, or a pinnace, to save –
With her hand round my waist, I’d fear not the wind or the wave.
’Tis down by the lake where the wild tree fringes its sides,
Jeremiah Joseph Callanan (1795–1829), ‘from the Irish’
21 Credhe’s Lament for Cail
O’er thy chief, thy rushing chief, Loch da Conn, Loud the haven is roaring;
All too late, her deadly hate for Crimtha’s son Yonder deep is deploring.
Small comfort, I trow, to Credhe is her wail, Slender solace now, oh, my Cail. Ochone! och, wirrasthrue! Can she, who slew, Bid thee back, Spirit soaring!
Hark, the thrush from out Drumqueen lifts his keen
Through the choir of the thrushes; With his mate, his screaming mate o’er the green
See! the red weasel rushes.
Crushed on the crag lies Glensilen’s doe, O’er her yon stag tells his woe, Thus, Cail, ochonee! for thee, for thee
My soul’s sorrow gushes.
O, the thrush, the mourning thrush, mating shall sing,
When the furze bloom is yellow!
O, the stag, the grieving stag in the spring
With a fresh doe shall fellow!
But love for me ’neath the ever moving mound
Of the scowling sea lieth drowned; While, Och, och, ollagone! the sea fowl moan And the sea beasts bellow.
Alfred Perceval Graves, after a modern translation of an ancient Irish poem printed in E. A. Sharp and J. Matthay (eds), Lyra Celtica, 1924
22 Ask me no more
Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape,
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answer’d thee?
Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: what answer should I give? I love not hollow cheek or faded eye: Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die! Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live; Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal’d: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.
Alfred Tennyson
23 To Music
Charm me asleep, and melt me so With thy delicious numbers, That being ravished, hence I go Away in easy slumbers. Ease my sick head, And make my bed, Thou power that canst sever From me this ill, And quickly still, Though thou not kill My fever.
Fall on me like a silent dew, Or like those maiden showers, Which, by the peep of day, do strew A baptism o’er the flowers. Melt, melt my pains, With thy soft strains; That having ease me given, With full delight, I leave this light; And take my flight For heaven.
Robert Herrick
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 songs by Dorothy Parke and Joan Trimble with Iain Burnside for Delphian Records (DCD34329).
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.
She has performed with RTVE Madrid, BBC TV and Radio3, RTÉ, Operavision, ARTtv and Swiss radio, the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre, 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.
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.
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 seventeen 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 radio and TV, notably as host of BBC R3’s acclaimed Voices series. In addition to a long
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.
Roderick Williams was awarded an OBE in June 2017 and was Artist in Residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra from 2020 to 2022, Artist in Residence at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival and Singer in Residence at Music in the Round. He was also one of the featured soloists at the coronation of King Charles III in 2023.
Roderick Williams is one of the most soughtafter baritones of his generation with a wide repertoire spanning baroque to contemporary. He enjoys relationships with all the major UK and European opera houses also performs regularly with leading conductors and orchestras throughout the UK, Europe, North America and Australia. Festival appearances include the BBC Proms, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh and Melbourne. As a recitalist he is in demand around the world and appears regularly at venues including the Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw and Musikverein and at song festivals including Leeds Lieder, Oxford International Song and Ludlow English Song.
Among his numerous recordings, those for Delphian include The Airmen, songs by Martin Shaw (DCD34105); Raymond Yiu’s The World Was Once All Miracle with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis (DCD34225); and the acclaimed Schubert lieder recording Der Wanderer (DCD34170), a Presto Recording of the Year finalist in 2016.
As a composer he has had works premiered at Wigmore Hall, the Barbican, the Purcell Room and on national radio. In 2016 he won Best Choral Composition at the British Composer Awards and from 2022/23 he held the position of Composer in Association of the BBC Singers.
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
Songs from the North of Ireland: Dorothy Parke – Joan Trimble
Carolyn Dobbin, Iain Burnside; with Amy Ní Fhearraigh soprano, Ingrid Sawers piano
DCD34329
Following the success of their partnership in Calen-o: Songs from the North of Ireland, Carolyn Dobbin and Iain Burnside return to Ulster’s rich but undervalued musical heritage with a programme of songs by two twentiethcentury women, all but a few of them premiere recordings.
Dorothy Parke is well known for her songs for children but is revealed here as a much more wide-ranging composer, steeped in the folk melody and poetry of Ireland. Joan Trimble, an accomplished concert pianist, left behind only a handful of published songs but a small trove of manuscripts, including her opera Blind Raftery, written for BBC Television in 1957, two arias from which complete this journey of discovery.
New in October 2024
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
