Samuel Barber: The Lovers; Prayers of Kierkegaard

. (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (February 10, 1994)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Koch Int'L Classics
• ASIN: B000001SF1
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,292 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #63 in Music > Classical > Historical Periods > Modern, 20th, & 21st Century > Composers

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Barber Rarities Shine, April 13, 2003

By 

Christopher Schmitz (Rocky River, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Samuel Barber: The Lovers; Prayers of Kierkegaard (Audio CD)

Samuel Barber had a reputation as a literary composer, and his taste in written material, the angsty journals of Soren Kierkegaard and the lushly sensual poems of Pablo Neruda, reflect well on his taste.

I'm a big Barber fan. His biography, which includes being an army brat, a drinker, and a homosexual, is intriguing, and his insistence on sad sweet lyricism and hummable melody through a 20th century of percussive dissonance and willful abstraction is brave.

I had high hopes for the Neruda settings. These poems fairly cackle with eroticism and sensuality, encompassing both love and loss. Barber's musical romanticism should have been the perfect match, but his take on "The Lovers" never quite comes to life. His melodies seem static here and fail to captivate--so unlike his achingly lovely Essays for Orchestra and famously elegaic Adagio for Strings.

The "Prayers of Kierkegaard," on the other hand, achieve sublimity. Barber's musical settings for these open the disc and show us many faces: quasi-Gregorian chant, mellifluous mezzo soloes, Stravinskian thunder, seamless choral work in the service of inspired melodies. It's intriguing that Barber seems more able to craft fine music for works about religious rather than erotic ecstasy.

This Grammy-winning disc is a pristine digital recording. Its clarity is beyond reproach, and its performances from the orchestra and the chorus are fine ones. Another reviewer prefers the Telarc recording of "Prayers," and I will be investigating this on the chance that he's correct. I hope so!
I'd gladly own two or more versions of this underrated work.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Two rarities from Barber, February 12, 2002

By 

Samer T Ismail "SF & classical music fan" (Danbury, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Samuel Barber: The Lovers; Prayers of Kierkegaard (Audio CD)

As the CD proclaims, this is the first recording of Barber's "The Lovers," a 1971 setting of poems from Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair." (Incidentally, Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.)

The lyrics, while neither "raunchy" nor obscene, are forthright: the baritones enter one of the work's nine movements singing "Strip off your clothes, strip off your clothes."

The forces acquit themselves admirably, as the piece slowly works its way from the lust of the opening movement to the despair of the final movement ("Cemetery of kisses"), with its final hushed lament, "Forsaken!" Duesing in particular makes a fine soloist in this work.

A bit less successful is the performance of "Prayers of Kierkegaard", which makes an interesting comparison, in that it is a setting of four prayers of divine love. The performance is good, but a comparison to Robert Shaw's Grammy-winning recording for Telarc does not help this CD. On the plus side, the "orchestral dance" before the final prayer comes off a little more clearly, and a little more heavily, on this CD. On the downside, Sarah Reese sings with far too much vibrato (as do, to a lesser extent, the sopranos in the chorus), robbing the soprano solo of much of the purity and beauty that Carmen Pelton gives the Telarc recording.

I would definitely recommend this to fans of Barber for "The Lovers" alone; if you're looking for "Prayers of Kierkegaard," however, go with Shaw on Telarc. [Also, at 52 minutes, the CD is a bit too short, at full-price, to recommend to someone just getting started with Barber. It is a pity, given the extra space available, that they couldn't have included a third work, such as Barber's "Medea's Dance of Vengeance"--which would have provided a third view on love (in this case, love denied/betrayed).]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpieces Revealed, March 8, 2011

By 

R. Fish "Robbie Fischer" (Missouri, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Samuel Barber: The Lovers; Prayers of Kierkegaard (Audio CD)

Tragically underrated and unsung, these vocal-orchestral masterpieces by 20th century American composer Samuel Barber come in for a powerhouse performance on this disc. The chorus in "Prayers of Kierkegaard" has a better sound than that in the Robert Shaw/Atlanta SO recording of the same. The soprano soloist is the weakest link on this record. I had not heard "The Lovers" before buying this disc, but I was surprised by its vibrancy. Such exciting music should not remain buried in obscurity, even if it seemed unfashionably conservative in its own time.