Barber: Hermit Songs; Mélodies Passagères; Dover Beach; etc, Finley/DrakeBaritone Gerald Finley and pianist Julius Drake Julius Drake is an English classical pianist, famous principally for his work as an accompanist to singers and instrumentalists. His recordings include Gramophone and Edison Award-winning discs with the English tenor Ian Bostridge for EMI, French oboe sonatas with Nicholas follow their outstanding disc of songs by Charles Ives Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American composer of modernist classical music. He is widely regarded as one of the first American classical composers of international significance. with a collection devoted to a very different American composer. Samuel Barber's particularly personal brand of romanticism seems so natural and unforced, it's unnecessary to attach the prefix "neo-" to it. Barber's gifts for elegant, melodic writing and his own early experiences as a singer (he once contemplated a career as a baritone) made him a natural songwriter, and two of the works here - the 10 settings of medieval Irish texts that make up his Hermit hermit [Gr.,=desert], one who lives in solitude, especially from ascetic motives. Hermits are known in many cultures. Permanent solitude was common in ancient Christian asceticism; St. Anthony of Egypt and St. Simeon Stylites were noted hermits. Songs Op 29, and the magically rapt version of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach Dover Beach (1867), is the most famous poem by Matthew Arnold and is generally considered one of the most important poems of the 19th century.[1] It was first published in the collection New Poems. - are among his finest achievements in any genre. The Mélodies Passagères, composed in the early 1950s for Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc Noun 1. Francis Poulenc - French pianist and composer (1899-1963) Poulenc , are a homage to French song; three other settings of James Joyce and some of Barber's songs to American texts are also included. Finley is a wonderfully persuasive advocate for all these songs, and shows that the best of them rank among the greatest of the 20th century. 
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