It’s been a busy political week and it’s not over yet. Here’s some music to read court transcripts by. This time I am going to focus on some of my favorite choral music (in no particular order).

First up is Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville:  Summer of 1915”. Just about everyone knows Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, but there’s more to his catalogue than that. The text is an edited version of a poem of the same name by James Agee. I have always especially loved this part:

All my people are larger bodies than mine, …
with voices gentle and meaningless like the voice of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.

I love Dawn Upshaw’s voice and I love her performance:

I’m a sucker for the end of Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aneas”. The aria “Dido’s Lament” often brings me to tears. Here’s a beautiful performance by Jessye Norman:

Just for fun, here’s a great version Annie Lennox recorded with The Voices of London:

 

This piece from Tomas Luis de la Victoria is part of a larger set of music for Tenebrae, a Christian Holy Week liturgy originally meant for Holy Saturday (the day before Easter Sunday), or now that some Christian denominations have a dedicated Easter Vigil service you can hear it used during the week. This piece is especially evocative and solemn. The text translation is:

O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.

Pay attention, all people, and look at my sorrow: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.

I love the casualness of this choir practice and the contrast with the otherworldly sound. (Click the link because it can’t be imbedded.)

I’ll end this interlude with the famous quartet, “Johanna” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd”, which I saw as a clueless 18 year old on a day trip with a bunch of students and teachers. It was my first Broadway show and it was a great way to get teenagers to sit through an opera (yes, I come down on the “opera” side of that argument). The original cast was superb and the story was compelling to a bunch of antsy teens. This is still one of my favorites from the show, if not my favorite one. Here’s a concert version, with a terrific lineup:

OK, now back to watching politics. Happy listening!