Bridge: Adoration, H 57

Some say love's a little boy,

And some say it's a bird,

Some say it makes the world go around,

Some say that's absurd…

W.H. AUDEN

Charting the course of a love affair – in song – through the eyes of a young woman who begins by asking the universal question, Tell me the truth about love presents a programme of 19th and 20th century song.

The album takes its title from Benjamin Britten’s 1938 seductive setting of W.H. Auden’s amusing poem and tries to pin down and define the most elusive of human emotions.

The story takes us from love at first sight with Schumann’s Seit ich ihn gesehen, breathless with wonder and fervent reverance and Chausson’s Le charme which describes the quiver of excitement and the tender veneration the girl feels when the boy’s smile catches her unawares to Loewe’s Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht gluben to describe the lovers first encounter.

As the love story unfolds and the couple become closer, it is illustrated with music such as Strauss’s Nachtgang, Rachmaninov’s Midsummer nights and Bridge’s Adoration. However the magic is soon broken and Sunday brings deception and betrayal. The girl finds out that the young man does not love her and she bitterly awakes from her dream. The feeling of love lost is brought to life through Brahm’s Am Sonntag Morgen, Schubert’s Du liebst mich nicht and Kurt Weill’s Je ne t’aime pas.

As a postlude, Britten’s arrangement of Early one morning perfectly sums up the story of the young girl and the final message of ‘how could you use a poor maiden so?’ lingers in the ear.

Amanda Roocroft has secured an international reputation as one of Britain’s most exciting singers, in opera, concert and recital and Joseph Middleton enjoys a busy and varied career as a chamber musician and song accompanist.

The complete orchestral works by Frank Bridge are here released in an attractive six-disc box for the first time, as part of the new Hickox Legacy commemorative series on Chandos Records, leading up to (and continuing beyond) the fifth anniversary, in Nov 2013, of the conductor’s untimely death. The box is released on the Chandos Classics label at Mid-Price – 6 CDs for the price of 4.

A couple of orchestral works aside, the repertoire of Frank Bridge was largely ignored until Hickox embarked on the complete cycle of his orchestral music, which revealed to the world what a remarkably varied and imaginative composer he was.

All of Bridge’s orchestral music is about something: there are nature-inspired tone poems, such as The Sea and Enter Spring; there are war-inspired works such as Oration and the Overture Rebus; and there are those pieces with a more ambiguous or elusive ‘emotional’ programme, such as Dance Poem and Phantasm.