Customer Reviews

Barber: Songs ~ Alexander

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4 star:		(1)
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First of all, I must mention that Chopra fan "Huntley Dent"'s review is not of this CD, Songs by Barber, which is all songs for voice and piano, but rather of Arias and Scenes, a collection also sung by Roberta Alexander and also on Etcetera of Barber's orchestral vocal music.

That said, this is an excellent collection of Barber's piano songs. Roberta Alexander has a lovely, creamy voice, and she puts real passion into these songs, though her diction is sometimes slightly occluded. Her performance of "Sure on This Shining Night" is spine-tingling.

There a couple of moments of slight distortion in the recording or the mastering at louder points in the performance.

Only three songs on this excellent CD are orchestral arrangements of songs originally written with piano accompaniment, but they include the haunting, masterful "Sure on This Shining Night," with text by James Agee. Agee was a natural lyrical fit for Barber's talents, as witness the famous "Knoxville, Summer of 1915"--it sets a prose poem to music that was the intorduciton to Agee's wonderful posthumous novel, "A Death in the Family."

Roberta Alexander does everything well. Her clear, striaghtforward, well-tuned soprano is without wobble or excessive vibrato, so one hears the words more clearly than usual. The arias come from Barber's operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra. It's a shame that the disastrous premiere of the latter effectively shamed Barber into giving up compsoing for the rest of his life.

For anyone who wants to hear a generous sample of Barber's writing for soprano, thse skillful interpretations are unmissable.

The beauty of the artist's voice shows through despite the difficulties of Barber's modern piano stylings. Fans of Barber's vocal music will enjoy this CD.