Three Shakespeare Songs

Description

for S(S)ATB unaccompanied Three Shakespeare Songs comprises three short movements setting texts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They were composed as test pieces for the 1951 British Federation of Music Festivals National Competitive Festival. The atmospheric first movement, ‘Full fathom five’, is mystical and beguiling, with eerie, hypnotic mimicry of bell tolls in the upper voices. ‘The Cloud-Capp’d Towers’, the slower central movement, recalls Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 6 in its harmonic language, while the third movement ‘Over hill, over dale’ is lively conclusion to the set, full of harmonic and rhythmic interest.