Words and Music - Birdsong

Birdsong has fascinated poets and musicians for centuries. This poetry selection spans 700 years, from Dafydd ap Gwilym's 14th-century hymn to the thrush to RS Thomas's more recent celebration of the blackbird, while the music ranges almost as far, from the Renaissance lute-song The dark is my delight to a section from Einojuhani Rautavaara's atmospheric Cantus arcticus, memorably enriched by the recorded sound of migrating swans. With a pair of 'catalogues' (opening with Izaak Walton's inventory of the 'nimble musicians of the air'), but for the greater part have chosen to concentrate on those songsters who have inspired the most frequent creative effort. Most popular among them by far is the nightingale, the thrilling musician of the woods who reduces the other birds to silence with her brilliance in Blake's Milton, sings her traditional song of lost love in Richard Barnfield's As it fell upon a day, and offers encouragement to human lovers in a ravishing air from Rameau's opera Hippolyte et Aricie. For Leslie Norris the voice of 'the poet's bird' is both pleasure and torment, a spur to the creative act and a reproach to human inadequacy. Not far behind is the skylark, whose ebullient airborne music - for many people the sound of the British summer - is here celebrated in an anonymous 17th-century poem and in music connecting its song to the cares of lovers from the English folk tradition and by Hoagy Carmichael. Less virtuosic but no less irresistible to artists have been the cuckoo - the two-note herald of spring humorously imitated by Saint-Saens and argued over in words by Wordsworth and Bunyan - and the owl, whose comforting and disturbing contributions to the soundscape of the winter night are evoked by Edward Thomas and in Dominick Argento's setting of lines from Love's Labour's Lost. Other composers and poets have essayed more demanding birdsong imitations: Olivier Messiaen's intricately notated representations became a vital part of his own creative personality; Gerard Manley Hopkins ambitiously attempts a verbal characterisation of a woodlark. Few of these skilful impressions would count for much without some wider resonance. We have seen that birdsong both marks out the seasons and reminds us of our humble place in the natural world. But above all, and as all the poets and composers represented in this programme have recognised, birdsong also touches something deep in our hearts, unstopping the streams of love, longing, memory, joy, laughter and melancholy that lie within us all. Readers: Claire Skinner (CS) Hugh Bonneville (HB) 00.00 Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler (excerpt) (HB) 02.05 Saint-Saens: Voliere (Le Carnaval des animaux) Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France Marek Janowski (conductor) TELDEC 4509 974452 03.20 John Lyly: Song (CS) 03.59 Britten: The Merry Cuckoo; Spring, the Sweet Spring (Spring Symphony) Alison Hagley, Catherine Robbin, John Mark Ainsley Philharmonia Orchestra John Eliot Gardiner (conductor) DG 453 433 2 07.36 William Wordsworth: To the Cuckoo (HB) 08.56 John Bunyan: Of the Cuckoo (CS) 10.16 Saint-Saens: Le coucou au fond des bois (Le Carnaval des animaux) As above 12.31 Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Thrush (HB) 13.49 Trad. Irish: The Morning Thrush Matt Molloy (flute) and band VIRGIN CDVE930 16.26 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Blackbird (CS) 17.39 RS Thomas: A Blackbird Singing (HB) 18.25 Messiaen: Le merle noir (Petites Esquisses d'oiseaux) Peter Hill (piano) UNICORN DKPCD9144 20.44 Anonymous: The Lark (CS) 00:23.11 Trad. English: The Lark in the Morning: Alva (Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin) BEJOCD-45 23.59 Hoagy Carmichael: Skylark Hoagy Carmichael (voice) and band PACIFIC JAZZ CDP746862 2 31.01 Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Woodlark (CS) 33.25 Edward Thomas: The Unknown Bird (HB) 35.24 Paul Reade: Birdsong (Aspects of a Landscape) Nicholas Daniel (oboe) LEMAN CLASSICS LC42801 36.10 William Blake: Milton (excerpt) (CS) 37.26 Anonymous: The Dark is my Delight Evelyn Tubb and Michael Fields MUSICA OSCURA 070980 38.48 John Milton: Sonnet I (HB) 39.39 Rameau: Rossignols amoureux (Hippolyte et Aricie) Patricia Petibon Les Arts Florissants William Christie (conductor) ERATO 0630 155172 45.20 Richard Barnfield: As it fell upon a day (CS) 46.39 Ravel: Oiseaux tristes (Miroirs) Tzimon Barto (piano) ONDINE ODE 1095-2 51.42 Leslie Norris: Nightingales (HB) 54.42 Respighi: L'usignuolo (Gli'uccelli) San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Edo de Waart (conductor) PHILIPS 411 419 2 59.07 Edward Thomas: The Owl (HB) 01:00.04 Argento: Winter (Six Elizabethan Songs) Howard Haskin and David Triestram DXL 1098 01:02.06 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Dying Swan (CS) 01:04.12 Rautavaara: Swans Migrating (Cantus arcticus) Lahti Symphony Orchestra Osmo Vanska (conductor) BIS CD-1038 01:10.27 Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush (HB).