|
The Bernard Stevens Trust is delighted to announce the release on Albany Records (TROY 418) of Bernard Stevens' last two major vocal compositions. |
|
The Shadow of the
Glen |
|
The True Dark |
|
|
|
Albany Records TROY 418 |
|
Also
available by secure credit-card transaction from
|
|
Click on the disc to hear an extract from the opera |
|
|
|
This is a streamed RealAudio file
|
|
The True Dark, songcycle for baritone and piano, Op.49, performed by Richard Jackson and Igor Kennaway, is a setting of the final section of an unpublished poetic trilogy, The Map, by Randall Swingler (1909-67). Written in the last eighteen months of his life, the trilogy is dedicated to Isabel Lambert, widow of the composer Constant Lambert. In his sleeve notes to accompany the recording, Malcolm MacDonald writes that The Map "is a restless meditation on the loss of old religious and intellectual certainties and the alternative consolation offered by the vastness of the cosmos now opened up to human minds." Stevens composed the songcycle in 1974, in memory of Swingler, one of his most valued friends. It was first performed in 1978 in a broadcast on BBC Radio 3 by the baritone Graham Titus and the pianist and scholar Erik Levi. |
| Stevens' only opera dates from 1978/9. The one-act The Shadow of the Glen (Op.50) is based on In the Shadow of the Glen, the first play by the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, and the first of Synge's works to stem from a story from the isolated Aran Islands in the West of Ireland. The libretto, adapted by Stevens himself, has an economy which is matched by the economy of forces: using four solo voices and a small chamber orchestra, he extracts a remarkable range of colour. The opera's plot hinges on the feigned death of one of the characters, and Stevens underpins the whole score with the Dies Irae plainsong, rather than resorting to Irish folksong themes. The Shadow of the Glen received its first performance on BBC Radio 3 in 1983, and it is this recording (produced by Chris de Souza) which appears on this CD. A semi-staged performance was given in Dublin in June 1988, conducted by Colman Pearce. |
| Bernard Stevens studied with E.J. Dent at Cambridge University, and R.O. Morris at the Royal College of Music, where he himself later became a distinguished professor. His First Symphony, written whilst serving in World War II, first brought him to public attention, when it won a competition for a Victory Symphony organised by the Daily Express. |
|
For
further information on the works of Bernard Stevens, please contact, in
the first instance,
|
