CONCERT at STIRLING
The
Lecture Room
The
Museum
To
mark the end of the exhibition,
The Man who Drew Pooh,
SANDRA LISSENDEN
soprano
&
KATHARINE DURRAN
piano
will
evoke a bygone era with…
SONGS
FROM THE NURSERY
7.30pm
Wine
included
Box
office: 01786 471917
Halfway
Down the Stairs…They're changing guard at
These
poems were all set to music by H.Fraser-Simson
in the 1920s, published in beautiful volumes with the illustrations of E.H.Shepard.
We will perform them together with a dozen more favourites with
words by A.A.Milne
(from When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six). We both first
encountered these perfectly crafted musical gems as small children sitting
on our grandfathers' knees at the piano! Indeed, Sandra's maternal
grandfather, George Wilson, had recorded some of the songs during the
1930s on brightly coloured shellac gramophone records in
"This is such music as a
child of five might write, had he the technical equipment of a
grownup". So wrote one admirer of Mussorgsky's
The Nursery. We perform the cycle in an English translation which
fully conveys the immediacy and charm of these extraordinary songs.
The threshold of a modern era
is touched upon in Thea Musgrave's
A Suite o'Bairnsangs, to poems by Maurice Lindsay. Each of these five tiny songs has its own questing
charm and perfection.
Six of Edward
German's 1903 settings of Kipling's
Just So poems complete the
recital, including the extrovert Rolling Down to Rio, the sentimental
First Friend and the virtuosic When the Cabin Portholes.