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- Alison Bauld
Farewell Already (1993)
- Novello & Co Ltd (World)
Programme Note
Alison Bauld: Farewell, Already
Alison Bauld studied in London, with Elizabeth Lutyens and Hans Keller, subsequently gaining a doctorate in composition at York University in 1973. But before leaving her native Australia, where she was born in 1944, she trained as an actress as well as a musician. In consequence, her output has not only revealed a gift for integrating musical and theatrical elements - culminating in her ballad opera Nell (1988) - but a special involvement with Shakespeare that has yielded five solo settings to date.
The present work was originally commissioned and broadcast by the BBC in 1985 as a radio piece for multi-tracked speaker - the composer herself - and the Arditti String Quartet, and Bauld retains this version in her catalogue under the title of Richard III. But in 1993, she compressed its substance into a concert piece for Jane Manning with the new title of Farewell, Already; recasting the vocal line as a study in contrasts between stylised speech, speech-song, and song as such. The text is a composite of Lady Anne's lamentations over the body of Henry VI and imprecations against murder Duke of Gloucester drawn from Act I, Scene II of Richard III. The form is broadly tripartite, with concerted outer sections linked by an unaccompanied central cantilena. After the intense, at times fugal, chromaticism of much of the writing, the pure white-note modality of the peroration for quartet alone comes with a particular poignancy.
© Bayern Northcott
Alison Bauld studied in London, with Elizabeth Lutyens and Hans Keller, subsequently gaining a doctorate in composition at York University in 1973. But before leaving her native Australia, where she was born in 1944, she trained as an actress as well as a musician. In consequence, her output has not only revealed a gift for integrating musical and theatrical elements - culminating in her ballad opera Nell (1988) - but a special involvement with Shakespeare that has yielded five solo settings to date.
The present work was originally commissioned and broadcast by the BBC in 1985 as a radio piece for multi-tracked speaker - the composer herself - and the Arditti String Quartet, and Bauld retains this version in her catalogue under the title of Richard III. But in 1993, she compressed its substance into a concert piece for Jane Manning with the new title of Farewell, Already; recasting the vocal line as a study in contrasts between stylised speech, speech-song, and song as such. The text is a composite of Lady Anne's lamentations over the body of Henry VI and imprecations against murder Duke of Gloucester drawn from Act I, Scene II of Richard III. The form is broadly tripartite, with concerted outer sections linked by an unaccompanied central cantilena. After the intense, at times fugal, chromaticism of much of the writing, the pure white-note modality of the peroration for quartet alone comes with a particular poignancy.
© Bayern Northcott