Jocelyn Freeman, Gemma Summerfield, Abi Hyde-Smith, Gareth Brynmor John – The Poet’s Echo (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:33 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RUBICON
The award-winning Welsh collaborative pianist and conductor Jocelyn Freeman is lauded for her artistry, programming and powers of communication. She is an advocate for diversity in a range of artistic endeavours, and a skilled communicator on the concert platform, and in broadcast, recording and social media. Founder-director and curator of SongEasel, an initiative established to provide a platform for song in South East London, Jocelyn has curated extensive concert and recording projects to wide critical acclaim.
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Gareth Brynmor John – The Children’s Hour (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:09 minutes | 1,03 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Champs Hill Records
The nineteenth-century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has rather fallen out of fashion these days, deemed inferior to his fellow American writers, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson and Melville. And yet, Longfellow is a memorable narrative poet, capable of creating persuasive characters and situations. Any parent will recognise the ‘patter of little feet’ that the protagonist of Longfellow’s 1860 poem, ‘The Children’s Hour’, hears one evening as he works, heralding, ‘The sound of a door that is opened,/ And voices soft and sweet.’ The poet-speaker seems happy to be interrupted by the ‘blue-eyed banditti’, vowing ‘I have you fast in my fortress,/ And will not let you depart’.
The ‘children’s hour’ is so cherished precisely because it is ephemeral, fragile, something that Longfellow, whose life was touched by family loss, had been forced by personal experience to understand and accept.
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Kitty Whately, Gareth Brynmor John, Susie Allan – Stanford: Children’s Songs (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:21 minutes | 1,30 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © SOMM Recordings
SOMM Recordings continues its widely acclaimed championing of the music of Charles Villiers Stanford with a captivating collection of his Children’s Songs by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and baritone Gareth Brynmor John, accompanied by pianist Susie Allan.
Including numerous first recordings and the first complete CD release of his setting of 14-year-old Helen Douglas Adam’s enchanting Songs from the Elfin Pedlar, it throws revealing new light on an important but largely overlooked aspect of Stanford’s output.
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