Curtis Summerfest Faculty Recital: BARBER - Hermit Songs

SAMUEL BARBER Hermit Songs, Op. 29
Sarah Shafer, soprano
Mikael Eliasen, piano
Performed on Thursday, June, 23, 2016
Field Concert Hall, Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia
Barber’s Hermit Songs are settings of anonymous texts by medieval Irish monks-at turns pious and bawdy-written in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. Barber found these texts “straightforward, droll, and often surprisingly modern.” Like the monks who wrote them, Barber himself was something of a hermit: He and his partner Gian Carlo Menotti, whom he met while both were students at Curtis, bought a home in upstate New York to escape the bustle of the city. Barber composed Hermit Songs in 1953; the same year, Leontyne Price premiered the cycle at the Library of Congress, with the composer at the piano.
Barber’s use of lean harmonies and ancient church modes evokes antiquity, yet the directness of the text setting is unmistakably of the 20th century. Barber eschews time signatures throughout, imbuing the songs with a rhythmic flexibility. The piano accompaniment is often pictorial: a repeated gesture in the left hand marks the pilgrim’s steady march in “At Saint Patrick’s Purgatory,” and the peal of the carillon rings out in “Church Bell at Night.” In “The Monk and His Cat,” the titular feline plods across the piano, striking “wrong” notes. “St. Ita’s Vision,” an account of the sixth-century nun begins with recitative followed by a tender and ecstatic lullaby sung to the baby Jesus.
The eternal and at times uneasy relationship between sacred and profane permeates the Hermit Songs. Barber heightens the solemn devotion of the Crucifixion with open, modal harmonies and spare melodies, while the vocal line in “Promiscuity,” a four-note figure of minor thirds, resembles a schoolyard taunt. “The Heavenly Banquet” depicts a mingling of heavenly and earthly pleasures, where saints, Jesus, and beer are all celebrated.
These varied ruminations on life and devotion conclude in reflection. Austere save for an emotional piano interlude, “A Desire for Hermitage” embraces solitude. The open intervals in the final bar of the piano are themselves empty cells, inviting closeness and isolation.
-Andy McIntyre
Learn more about this work: • Curtis Summerfest Facu...
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[@natalielewis-mezzo-soprano6167]

This is stunning!

[@neilwalsh3977]

Barber is a composer who just grows on you, the more you listen.

[@chenyexiong5712]

13:28 The monk

[@chenyexiong5712]

2:48 St. Ita’s’ Vision

[@palashvictor]

Ok ✅ will let you know that I’m ok