‘Having served the songs of Charles Ives with enormous distinction, the partnership of baritone Gerald Finley and pianist Julius Drake shift artistic gear to explore works by one of America's greatest tunesmiths. Samuel Barber's lyrical writing and subtle feeling for expressive shading were matched in his songs by a Britten-like aptness for word-setting, which ideally suits Finley's compelling blend of emotional conviction and vocal sensibility. On the strength of his interpretation of the Hermit Songs alone, regardless of his majestic readings of Barber's Rilke settings and Dover Beach, Finley enables this album to command its price as one of the year's finest vocal releases. Unmissable’ (Classic FM Magazine).

Dover Beach Summary - e. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is a poem set near Dover, along the southeast coast of England, where Arnold and his new.

‘Hearing the Hermit Songs in a man's voice, this man's voice, is little short of a revelation there's a world of feeling in these 10 songs, and Finley, accompanied throughout by pianist Julius Drake in a way that would make Barber proud, burrows deeply into every niche I held my breath before 'Sure on this shining night', my favorite Barber song of all, an ecstatic setting of a rapturous James Agee poem that's harder to bring off than its simple, swelling lines would suggest. Finley hit it out of the park’ (Bay Area Reporter, USA).

While he sometimes dismissed his youthful works, Barber retained a special affection for Dover Beach Op 3; nearly fifty years after he first composed it, he remarked on the maturity of his setting of Matthew Arnold’s text and the timelessness of the poem, saying that the emotions evoked by both words and music seemed contemporary. Clearly the exalted pessimism of Arnold’s vision struck a resonant chord with Barber. The poem depicts human misery as grounded in the loss of religious faith, isolating each human being from his or her fellows. The sea’s ebb-tide, as seen from the beach, is the controlling metaphor: it stands for the retreating ‘sea of faith’ in whose place mere Nature can offer no comfort, only a confirmation of the human predicament.

Barber’s setting begins as an atmospheric evocation of the calm sea seen at night in an austere D minor. But the pitiless processes of the tides causes the emotion to darken, and the music responds with denser, more painful harmonies. The central move to a hymn-like D major brings no relaxation; the timbres of the string quartet create a strongly plangent emotional effect, most of all at the tragic return to D minor and the climactic appeal ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!’.

The reprise of the opening music at the end is a daring stroke—Arnold’s ‘ignorant armies [that] clash by night’ would seem to demand more violent expression, but Barber stresses the indifference of nature in the face of human doubt. From notes by Calum MacDonald © 2007.

Abstract Samuel Barber’s early cantata for voices and organ, Christmas Eve, is a previously unstudied area of Barber’s childhood output. Utilizing the composer’s manuscripts from his time as a student of Sidney Homer, the score has been reconstructed. The reconstruction has revealed Barber’s considerable ability to intuit and assimilate the styles of contemporary American sacred choral works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while capturing the essence of dramatic musical gesture. It is a work that demonstrates a creative sophistication far beyond the early years of a young composer. By examining this work we are able to observe the artistic energies of a future master composer, celebrated for his works in the vocal canon, as well as consider afresh the composer-performer-audience relationship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. • If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.

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