Barber: Dover Beach; Knoxville: Summer of 1915; Hermit Songs; Andromache’s Farewell
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Juilliard String Quartet. Eleanor Steber, soprano; Dumbarton Oaks Orchestra; William Strickland, conductor. Leontyne Price, soprano; Samuel Barber, piano. Martina Arroyo, soprano; New York Philharmonic; Thomas Schippers, conductor.
Sony [catalog number]. Recorded 1950, 1954, 1967. No texts. CD, 50:00.
This Sony compilation—now a decade into its catalog life, apparently—offers a curious mixed bag of Barber’s vocal writing, spanning from the youthful Dover Beach to the full-blown operatic ambitions of Andromache’s Farewell. The programming is intelligent. The performances? Well, that’s where things get interesting.
Fischer-Dieskau tackles Dover Beach with his customary gravitas, perhaps a shade too much of it. The Juilliard Quartet provides elegant support in this 1967 recording, but there’s something almost Germanic in the baritone’s approach to Arnold’s Victorian melancholy—a certain stolidity that doesn’t quite catch the English twilight quality Barber surely had in mind. The string writing is exquisite, of course: those suspended harmonies, the way Barber lets the quartet breathe around the vocal line. Fischer-Dieskau gives us every word, but I’m not entirely convinced he gives us the sea.
Eleanor Steber’s 1950 Knoxville: Summer of 1915 remains something of a touchstone—how could it not, given that she premiered the work? Yet I confess a certain ambivalence. The mono sound places her voice right at the microphone, and William Strickland’s Dumbarton Oaks Orchestra provides sensitive accompaniment, but there’s an interpretive primness here that later sopranos have loosened to good effect. Dawn Upshaw’s Teldec version, which I prefer, finds more of the languid Southern heat in Agee’s text, that peculiar blend of nostalgia and foreboding. Steber is luminous—no question—but perhaps too careful, too aware of creating a monument.
The real treasures here are the Hermit Songs.
Leontyne Price recorded these with Barber himself at the piano in 1954, just a year after their premiere, and the intimacy is palpable. Listen to “The Monk and His Cat“—Price’s diction is crystalline, yes, but there’s also a delicious playfulness in her phrasing, a Caribbean lilt (as the original reviewer notes) that catches the medieval Irish text’s gentle humor. Barber’s piano playing is surprisingly assured, though he’s no Rachmaninoff. What matters is the collaboration, the sense of two artists who know exactly what they’re after. “St. Ita’s Vision” has an almost Poulenc-like simplicity, and Price resists any temptation to oversell the mysticism. The 1954 mono sound is more than adequate—these songs demand presence, not spatial grandeur.
Then comes Andromache’s Farewell, and we’re suddenly in different territory altogether. The voltage jump from the Hermit Songs’ chamber intimacy to the full New York Philharmonic under Thomas Schippers is deliberately jarring—this is Barber at his most operatically ambitious, written in 1962 when he was deep into Antony and Cleopatra. Martina Arroyo brings her considerable dramatic soprano to bear on Euripides’ text (in John Patrick Creagh’s translation), and Schippers knows how to build a scene. The orchestration has real bite—there’s an astringency here, a willingness to let dissonance intrude that shows Barber inching toward a harder-edged modernism.
But does it work? Mostly. Arroyo has the voice for it, certainly—that gleaming top, the dramatic thrust. And yet there’s something slightly generic about the piece itself, isn’t there? For all its turbulence and tenderness (and both are present), it doesn’t quite achieve the searing inevitability of, say, Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, which it resembles in ambition if not execution. The climax around 9:13 is glorious—or would be, if the engineers hadn’t pulled back on the levels just as Arroyo reaches her peak. Tape saturation management, presumably, but frustrating nonetheless.
No texts are provided, which is frankly inexcusable for a mid-price reissue, even if all the singers enunciate admirably. The playing time—just over fifty minutes—feels stingy by modern standards, though what’s here is substantial enough.
For Barber enthusiasts, this remains essential despite its limitations. The Price-Barber Hermit Songs alone justify the purchase, and Arroyo’s Andromache’s Farewell deserves wider hearing. As a survey of Barber’s vocal writing, it’s incomplete but valuable—a snapshot of midcentury American art song and opera in capable, sometimes inspired hands.
