Sleeve Notes

"These performances of my music are the kind that every composer hopes for - but rarely has the good fortune to hear. I can’t speak for George Gershwin but I'm pretty sure he would have joined in the chorus of approval."

JOHN W DUARTE

The fretted, plucked-string instruments have been used from the very earliest times to accompany the human voice; a task to which they are very well suited by their contrasting tone quality, sufficient but not excessive volume and, since the heyday of the lute (16th-18th centuries), their keyboard-like ability to provide melodic lines, counterpoint and harmony. Some of the finest songs of the Renaissance times were those written with a lute accompaniment by, among others, John Dowland and Thomas Campion. The classic guitar was born with the 19th century, throughout which it was the constant handmaiden of singers, predominantly in the salon or the domestic drawing room. The songs written in that period rarely required the guitarist to do more than supply simple chords and arpeggios, and, as did lute-songs of earlier times, used the same music for each verse or stanza.

In the 20th century the guitar, in many variant forms, has become perhaps the most common accompanist to singers of all kinds - folk, skiffle, rock, and in the more 'serious' area of 'art-song'. The use of the guitar in this last connection has, too, become more 'pianistic' in its fuller deployment of the instrument’s capabilities and in its integration with the voice, to form a more equal partnership rather than to remain innocuously in the background.

The Five quiet songs were written in 1968, one year after the tragic and unexpected death of the great French guitarist Ida Presti at the age of 43. Their connecting thread is thus the subject of human morality and transience, with an affirmation of faith in the final song - Ida Presti was a devout Catholic. In 1982 the American guitarist Alice Artzt suggested that I write a homage to Presti, who had been one of her teachers; my response was Idylle pour Ida. The piece reflects the lyrical side of her nature and, in the central section, both her more mischievous and serious 'faces'; it remembers also her fondness for passages in which open and stopped-string notes are run together in bell-like fashion - the campanella effect.

Though it has its more mournful aspects, the theme of friendship and love - that of my other song-cycle, is more cheerful. The happier aspects gradually displace the painful ones as the cycle unfolds. No further explanation is needed than that the work was written for Jacqueline Fox. who, accompanied by Michael Edmonds, premiered it in the Purcell Room (London) in 1985.

The suite Birds (written in 1977) consists of three sound-paintings depicting the characteristics of their subjects; they are not based on bird-songs - few birds have songs that are readily translatable into music and recognisable to non-ornithologists, but the three chosen here have identifiable traits. Swallows are graceful, swooping in flight - the ‘chiming’ notes that begin the piece, reappearing twice, suggest that they are circling a church tower. Finally they vanish into the blue. The swan too is graceful - but in a different way, floating gently (on an undulating bass line) and displaying the beauty of its (melodic) curves. It is also popularly associated with sadness and there is a corresponding vein of sad dignity in the music of this portrayal. One would hardly choose the swan for the character of its song; legend has it that the swan only sings when it is about to die! In this piece there is no death scene, the swan simply floats gently out of sight. Sparrows are gregarious, noisy, unpredictable in their movements (the rhythm of the opening section, which serves as a rondo theme, is irregular), quarrelsome and cheeky. All these characteristics are portrayed in the music, an antidote to the swan's solemnity.

If, in its proper sense, the term 'classic' refers to something that is a model of its kind, and that is has survived the test of time, the songs of George Gershwin are indeed 'classics'. Paraphrasing Constant Lambert, they may also be described as ‘popular and congenial art-songs'. Most of those included in this recording were written for Broadway ‘musicals’ (Summertime is from his opera Porgy and Bess), but they belong to an era in which the best popular songs were truly art-songs, in which imagination, inspiration and craftsmanship shaped both the music and the lyrics, an era in which Gershwin kept company with Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and others. I have given them jazz-tinged settings, exercising a little 'arranger’s licence’ with the harmony and interpolating (in Nice work if you can get it, Somebody loves me, and By Strauss) a few other tunes, not all by Gershwin. Affection and enthusiasm have attended this pleasant work, for this was the popular music of my own youth!

JOHN W DUARTE

Credits