Ives's "General William Booth Enters into Heaven"
Nathan Gunn, Baritone | Kevin Murphy, Piano
EMI Classics
At a Glance
Nathan Gunn has chosen a program devoted entirely to songs in
English, including pieces by British composers Roger Quilter and
George Butterworth, and American composers Ben Moore, Samuel
Barber, Charles Ives, Paul Bowles, and Jennifer Higdon. Though this
music ranges in time from the turn of the 20th century to 2005,
many of the songs share a pastoral quality and a strong vein of
nostalgia. While Quilter and Moore yearn for a pastoral idyll in
unspoiled Scotland and Ireland, Ives returns in his imagination to
small-town Danbury, Connecticut, as it was when he was growing up
there in the late-19th century. With the words of poet Tennessee
Williams, Paul Bowles—a talented composer known today more for his
novels and short stories—yearns for lost innocence and even Heaven
itself in his Blue Mountain Ballads. But for Barber (and
librettist Matthew Arnold) in Dover Beach, even the memory
of a beautiful night on the southern coast of England brings no
comfort.
The program closes with a major new work by Pulitzer Prize-winner
Jennifer Higdon, Dooryard Bloom. It sets one of the
greatest of all American poems, Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd," written as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln
after his assassination in 1865. Higdon originally created this as
a work for baritone and large orchestra for the 50th anniversary of
the Brooklyn Philharmonic, but this evening we hear it in her most
recent arrangement for baritone, string quartet, and piano.