Recording Information:
Recorded in Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, UK on 6 & 7 March 2011
Producer & Engineer: Adam Binks
Executive Producers: Adam Binks and Jonathan Manners
Cover image: The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Booklet Notes:
C. Armstrong Gibbs (1889-1960)
Songs of the Mad Sea Captain, Op. 111
Cecil Armstrong Gibbs was born at Great Baddow, near Chelmsford, Essex, in 1889, and died in Chelmsford in 1960. His principal teacher was Ralph Vaughan Williams, and much of his work - an opera, incidental music for plays, songs and symphonies - was in forms Vaughan Williams had mastered. These four songs are settings of poems by Bernard Martin, from his children's book Red Treasure, published in 1945. Red Treasure is a rattling yarn of lost rubies, Burmese tribesmen, white-cliffed islands and prisoners held hostage. Captain Adam is a ferocious sea-dog who has washed up on one of these islands in search of the fabled rubies from Pegu. He captures the narrator of the tale and forces him (by tying him to a tree) to listen to several of his songs, which he sings in a fine bass voice with all the mannerisms of an opera star. 'Hidden Treasure' tells of the rubies of Pegu and ivories of Cathay, lost at sea. Any sailor rash enough to seek for them is bound to end up in Davy Jones's locker. 'Abel Wright' is a sinister little shanty about a ship's carpenter, whose ship sprang a leak and sank, and of a ship's cook called Nobby Clark, who is buried at sea.
'Toll the Bell' is a yarn about a ship wrecked in the Bay of Bengal, which foundered because it had been sent to sea by a fiend from Hell, and planned a terrible fate for the Master, the crew and the Mate. 'The Golden Ray' is sung at a point in the story when the Captain, now quite mad, has thrown off his clothes and run into the sea to escape his pursuers, and sings ‘with his magnificent voice a song I had not heard before ... I was fascinated by the rolling tune and stood listening...' This song tells of a beautiful bay in the Indian ocean, where the sea shines with phosphorescence and the crew of the Golden Ray was ‘fought and beaten, then cooked and eaten, by pirates from Malay.' It ends with a warning not to put to sea in search of treasure, a message Captain Adam has been emphasising throughout the novel. Towards the end of the novel, after finding and losing the chest of rubies, the Captain falls off a cliff and into a pool of boiling mud, and that is the end of him.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Drei Gesänge von Metastasio D. 902
Among the last songs Schubert wrote were these three settings of aria texts by Pietro Metastasio, the great eighteenth-century librettist who had spent most of his career in Vienna. The first, L'incanto degli occhi' comes from Act 2 of Metastasio's libretto Attilio Regolo. The melody is decidedly Italianate, with quantities of coloratura ornamentation, while the chugging piano accompaniment belongs firmly in Schubert's familiar lieder style.
'Il traditor deluso' is a recitative and aria, again in thoroughly operatic style, with a melodramatic accompaniment to the declamatory recitative, that leads into the aria itself, in which the deluded traitor finds himself enveloped by a dark night of terror with ghosts and other horrors all around him. The effect is closer to Weber than to the Italians, with more than a hint of the Wolf's Glen scene of Der Freischütz The Mozartian phrase that opens the third song, 'The way to take a wife' declares it to be a comic ballad, in which the singer makes a case in favour of marrying for money. What happens next, as the outrageous argument unfolds through the ballad's verses, is worthy of Leporello, and Schubert clearly has Don Giovanni in mind.
W.A. Mozart (1756-1791)
Mentre ti lascio, o figlia K.513
Mozart wrote this aria in 1787 for Gottfried von Jacquin, dating it 27 March, and taking his text from Duca Sant'Angioli-Morbilli's opera libretto La disfatta di Dario (The Defeatof Darius). The Viennese family of von Jacquin had made friends with Mozart: the father, Nikolaus Joseph, was a professor of botany at the University of Vienna, and his second son Emilian Gottfried was an official in the Austro-Bohemian chancellery. Mozart taught him music, and he published a number of Mozart's songs as his own compositions, with Mozart's consent. The friendship between von Jacquin and the Mozart family flourished for several years, and one of Mozart's most important letters, sent from Prague and describing the success there of The Marriage of Figaro, was addressed to von Jacquin, along with a new nickname 'Hinkity Honky' that Mozart had concocted for him, along with other equally silly names for other friends and relations, to while away the coach journey from Vienna. Mozart wrote to him shortly after setting this aria to tell him the sad news that Leopold Mozart had died. Hem continued to write gossipy, chatty letters to von Jacquin, and from them we gain a great deal of information about Mozart's life, passions and personality. The libretto was set in full by Paisiello, and given its first performance at the Teatro Argentino, Rome, in 1776. This aria describes Darius's grief at being parted from his daughter. The opening section of the aria, marked larghetto, sets a mood of sorrow and resignation, but the emotion grows desperate as the tempo changes to allegro. The aria belongs to the tradition of opera seria, and although Mozart wrote it in the midst of his collaboration with Lorenzo da Ponte, it has more of the mood of Idomeneo or the later La clemenza di Tito than of either The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni.
Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
This poet sings (Anacreon's Defeat)
Bacchus is a pow'r divine
These two songs by Purcell are evocations of women and wine respectively. The first is a setting of an anonymous translation of a poem by the Greek poet Anacreon. The poet says how some poets sing of war, others of wine, while he sings of his defeats, not by armies or navies, but by the fatal power of his mistress's eyes. In 'Bacchus is a pow'r divine', Purcell sets words of a drunkard's song, celebrating the force of wine to drive away care, bring pleasant thoughts, give illusions of wealth, pour scorn on martial valour, until the singer begs the soldier to consider the benefits of being dead drunk, instead of dead on the field of battle. The words are by an anonymous poet, and the song was published in 1698, three years after Purcell's death.
J. Frederick Keel (1871-1954)
Three Salt-Water Ballads
J. Frederick Keel published his
Three Salt-Water Ballads in 1919, setting poems by John Masefield. Masefield had sailed in naval vessels and windjammers, and his collection of sea-inspired poems Salt-Water Ballads came out in 1902. Masefield was appointed Poet Laureate in 1930, and held the post until his death in 1967. 'Port of Many Ships' is a lyrical evocation of the afterworld of Kingdom Come, where the singer wishes to be. Heaven in his vision is an ideal port full of ships ready to set sail, wrecks from long ago brought back to life with their crews on board. The lilting 'Trade Winds' evokes the tropical islands on the Spanish Main, with their fireflies and moonlight, palmtrees and the 'long, low croon' of the winds themselves. 'Mother Carey' is an old sea-hag who lives on an iceberg alongside Davy Jones, and she brings about shipwrecks and tempests. The song is a fast patter-setting of the third of these lively ballads.
© 2011 Simon Rees
