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- Thea Musgrave
Songs for a Winter's Evening (1995)
- Novello & Co Ltd (World)
Comissioned by the 17th Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival and the 1st Burns International Festival
- 2222/3210/perc/hp/str
- soprano and piano
- soprano
- 21 min
- Robert Burns
- English
Programme Note
This work was commissioned by the 17th Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival and the 1st Burns international Festival. The first performance was given on 1 June 1996 at Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries, Scotland by Marie McLaughlin and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joseph Swenson.
This commission, to celebrate Robert Burns on the occasion of the 200 years since his death, has caused me to revisit my Scottish heritage. As much as this heritage is inevitably part of my life, so, in this work, the tunes to which Burns wrote his inimitable poems are embedded in the musical texture – sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background.
The poems were carefully chosen with a view to creating a song cycle describing the ‘events’ in the life of a woman, from the flirtatious young girl, to the young woman betrayed, to her eventual fulfilment in the mature love which has lasted many a year.
The challenge was how to integrate Burns’s 18th century world with our own, both emotionally and musically. Musically this meant finding a melodic and harmonic language that though recognising and incorporating the original tunes, they would nevertheless be heard from a contemporary viewpoint. The past can only ever be revisited with our own contemporary imagination and sensibility.
Thea Musgrave
This commission, to celebrate Robert Burns on the occasion of the 200 years since his death, has caused me to revisit my Scottish heritage. As much as this heritage is inevitably part of my life, so, in this work, the tunes to which Burns wrote his inimitable poems are embedded in the musical texture – sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background.
The poems were carefully chosen with a view to creating a song cycle describing the ‘events’ in the life of a woman, from the flirtatious young girl, to the young woman betrayed, to her eventual fulfilment in the mature love which has lasted many a year.
The challenge was how to integrate Burns’s 18th century world with our own, both emotionally and musically. Musically this meant finding a melodic and harmonic language that though recognising and incorporating the original tunes, they would nevertheless be heard from a contemporary viewpoint. The past can only ever be revisited with our own contemporary imagination and sensibility.
Thea Musgrave
Media
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 1. I am my mammy's ae bairn
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 2. Summer's a pleasant time
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 3. O, whistle an' I'll come to ye, my lad!
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 4. Ca' the yowes to the knowes
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 5. Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 6. Jamie come try me
Songs for a Winter's Evening: No. 7. John Anderson my jo
Scores
Preview the score
Features
- Thea Musgrave at 95
- Distinguished Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave CBE celebrated her 95th birthday on 27 May 2023. Her seven-decade career has earned her many honorifics and awards and she continues to compose fresh and exciting work marked by technical precision and a strong sense of drama.
Reviews
Thea Musgrave's Songs for a Winter's Evening was a perfect bed partner for Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. She inhabits the same world of ecstatic allusion as Britten in these brilliant settings of Burns's poems, skilfully weaving elements of the traditional tunes with orchestral colourings that are as light and witty as they can be dark and troublesome.
13th February 2010
Discography
Turbulent Landscapes
- LabelNMC
- Catalogue NumberNMC D153
- ConductorJiri Belohlavek / Osmo Vänskä
- EnsembleBBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / BBC Symphony Orchestra
- SoloistLisa Milne, soprano; Evelyn Glennie, percussion
