Wood, Haydn: A brown bird singing

Dame Felicity Lott, revered British soprano, says of this CD:

“ Summertime also has many of my favourite songs in English, French and German. We made the CD at a friend`s house, and the sessions were so relaxed, with no London traffic to cause endless retakes! It`s a real mix of beautiful songs of all kinds, on a summer theme. I chose songs I loved, from Gershwin to Christopher Robin….

Three centuries of song are represented here, and, as BBC Music Magazine's Hilary Finch put it “such is the skill of Johnson's programming that the entire recital seems to be a single, sustained exhalation of rapture and reflection”

She went on to say:

The upper reaches of Lott's still gleaming soprano inhabit Barber's 'Shining Night' and Fauré's Clair de lune'. And her robust English version of Schubert's 'Who is Sylvia?' finds an irresistible companion in Arne's 'Where the Bee Sucks', with its veritable midsummer night's dream of an accompaniment from Johnson. The artists' palpable sense of joy and well-being gathers momentum as they visit Berlioz's 'L'île inconnue' and as they sing on the water with Schubert. . . . And Lott and Johnson know well that the only way to face sentiment is to acknowledge its own integrity, as they do when they listen to Haydn Wood's 'Little Brown Bird' and eavesdrop with Fraser-Simson on Christopher Robin saying his prayers.

This CD features songs from a great variety of composers - Gershwin, Barber, Cole Porter, Bernstein, Brahms, Schubert, Arne, Schumann, Berlioz, and many more. A full 29 tracks of summer-themed songs!

This collection has been prepared with three main aims: firstly to prove that the so-called boundaries between light and classical music are not as insurmountable as some people seem to imagine; secondly to illustrate that many composers, who may usually be associated with more serious works, also had their lighter moments; and thirdly to offer several examples of the tasteful way in which arrangers of the 20th century adapted the classics to make them more instantly appealing to their audience. For many years such ‘tampering with the classics’ was banned by the BBC in Britain, although commercial recordings could be freely purchased. However a lack of broadcasts obviously affected sales, which partly explains why such recordings were more common in the United States than in Britain. Among the leading US musicians who often strayed into classical territory were David Carroll, Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, Clebanoff and even Ray Conniff. They are joined by Charles Williams, Angela Morley and other familiar figures on the UK scene.

Rita Hunter is one of the great unsung heroines of the world of sopranos. This recording was made at a concert given in London in the 70s and shows her at her best in a programme of variety and passion.