Tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook undertake an ambitious program with Solitude, and on balance, they have the chops to carry it off. Solitude is not just a thematic album but one that examines its main idea from different historical perspectives, requiring the performers to shift stylistic gears. The program opens with Henry Purcell's O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice, arranged for voice and piano by Benjamin Britten: a perfect specimen of classic English melancholy. Schubert's little-programmed Einsamkeit, D. ...
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Tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook undertake an ambitious program with Solitude, and on balance, they have the chops to carry it off. Solitude is not just a thematic album but one that examines its main idea from different historical perspectives, requiring the performers to shift stylistic gears. The program opens with Henry Purcell's O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice, arranged for voice and piano by Benjamin Britten: a perfect specimen of classic English melancholy. Schubert's little-programmed Einsamkeit, D. 620, somewhere between a six-section song and a little song cycle, has a text by Mayrhofer that expresses a wholly different kind of solitude: Olympian detachment. Jonathan Dove's Under Alter'd Skies, with texts by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is about the loneliness that follows personal loss. Also not commonly heard are Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs, Op. 29, based on writings by medieval Irish monks on the subject of the inner peace that comes with solitude. These often evanescent little...
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