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My Love and I
Performed by the Men of Melodious Accord
Alice Parker, Conductor
American composer, conductor, and teacher, Boston-born Alice Parker first came to public attention for her arrangements in collaboration with the late choral conductor Robert Shaw. Building on an international reputation, she has continued composing in many forms, researching folk music, conducting performances and workshops all over the continent, and speaking at large and small gatherings of choral musicians. In this recording, the men of her ensemble, Melodious Accord, sing love songs from around the world.
From America:
Seeing Nellie Home
Stars of the Summer Night
Darling Nellie Gray
From England and Scotland:
Passing By
Turn Ye to Me
When Love is Kind
Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes
Sea Shanties
Haul Away, Joe
Lowlands
A-Roving
From France, Czech Republic, Germany:
L'Amour de Moy
Stodole Pumpa
Treue Liebe
Du, du liegst mir im Herzen
From Spain:
La Tarara
Adios, Catedral de Burgos
Al Olivo
From Ireland:
Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded
A Ballynure Ballad
Down by the Sally Gardens
To Ladies' Eyes
From America:
Aura Lee
My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean
Vive L'Amour
American Record Guide, November/December 2003
Alice Parker is a national treasure: America's reigning queen of choral music. She was a longtime colleague of Robert Shaw -- and we have the two of them to thank for hundreds of superb, pioneering arrangements of early American choral music, spirituals, and both foreign and domestic folk songs. There are probably very few serious American choral singers who haven't sung at least a couple of them. No scholar or performer has plumbed the American choral tradition more thoroughly.
Here she leads the mellifluous and lusty voices of the men from her well-known ensemble, Melodious Accord. They offer us a feast of unrelenting nostalgia, as they serve up an international array of 24 folk songs arranged for TTBB. The main fare is familiar classics from America, England, Scotland, and Ireland; but the folk traditions of France, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Spain are sampled as well. A great many of them are love-songs. Parker contributes a few of her own arrangements here, and teh rest are all collaborations with Shaw. Everything is a cappella.
Among many beloved standards from the English-speaking lands are 'Seeing Nellie Home,' 'Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,' A Ballynure Ballad,' and 'Aura Lee'--plus the sea shanties 'Haul Away Joe' and "A-Roving.' Spice and variety come with such foreign gems as "L'amour de moy,' 'Stodola Pumpa,' du, du Liegst mir im Herzen,' and 'La Tarara.' The arrangements, as you would expect, are unfailingly rich and lovely: simple, moving folk tunes transformed into high art.
The men sing with sumptuous, full-throated splendor in every piece. But the masculine glory of their sound is tempered by a woman's touch. Parker consistently draws sensitive, exquisitely nuanced singing from these gifted guys. The secret of the best men's ensembles is to master--as this group has--that most elusive of paradoxes: masculine sentiment.
Parker sums this winner up in the final line of her excellent notes: "So, we sing and love and lose and laugh and cry, and are at our most human when we suffer these arrows of desire and regret." And here the hapless listener "suffers" right along. This is sweet, resounding ear-candy from start to finish; and it feeds the heart, too--my box of kleenex got raided yet again. No fan of male choruses or folk arrangements should be without it. Sound quality is clear, up-front, and full. The abbreviated texts are more than adequate.
A parting tribute to a great Lady: Ms Parker, in her acknowledgements, pays homage to the legacy of Maestro Shaw--who, she reminds us, "taught us how a chorus should sound." But, my dear Alice, so did YOU! Thanks for all you have given us, and God bless you.
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Program Notes
MY LOVE AND I
Songs for Male Voices
arranged by Alice Parker and Robert Shaw
It was down by the Sally Gardens/My love and I did meet . . .
Singing must be the most satisfying way to express love. How else can we account for the wealth of love songs in every tongue? The love may be true or false, eternal or ephemeral, courtly or boisterous: still it finds its story, its tune, its protagonists (often including the singer) and, sometimes, its moral. The songs that linger in the ear’s recesses and the mind’s depths endure for generations, resurfacing at odd intervals to bathe us anew in this universal emotion.
Sheer masculine exuberance fuels such songs as A-Roving, To Ladies’ Eyes andVive L’Amour, while a much more subdued, gentle longing is expressed in Turn Ye to Me, Stars of the Summer Night (with its lovely poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and Aura Lee. We find an intellectual, philosophical wit masquerading as folk song in Ben Jonson’s Drink to MeOonly, Thomas Moore’s When Love is Kind and Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded, and William Butler Yeats’ unforgettable It Was Down by the Sally Gardens. Anonymous singers give us such gifts as the haunting Lowlands, with its evocation of the rolling of the sea; the country dances of Du, du liegst mir im Herzen and Stodole Pumpa; and the story-telling of the very Irish A Ballynure Ballad (‘For it’s I have got the cordial eye that far exceeds the whiskey!’) and the very Spanish Al Olivo (‘The dark-eyed maiden rescued me when I fell from the olive tree.’)
The loved-one is evoked in all her beauty in the fifteenth century L’Amour de Moy, which places her in the midst of the flowers in the garden, while she is only glimpsed once in Passing By. The Spaniard describes his love in her suggestive dance in La Tarara (with the ice-cold gardenia at her bosom). The German lover in Treue Liebe swears eternal fidelity, as does the Castilian who addresses both his native city and its ‘burgalesa’ when he bids them farewell in Adios, Catedral de Burgos.
Haul Away, Joe is a true work song, with its muscular refrain and rough humor, while My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean can only be described as a play song: pure idiocy. (Both would have been enriched by improvised verses which would not bear repetition.) And the American glee-club tradition is maintained in such nineteenth-century favorites as Seeing Nellie Home andDarling Nellie Gray.
So, we sing and love and lose and laugh and cry, and are at our most human when we suffer these arrows of desire and regret.
She bade me take life easy/ As the grass grows on the weirs,
But I was young and foolish/ And now am full of tears.
--Alice Parker
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