Frank Bridge - 3 Songs for Voice, Viola and Piano (H. 76)

00:06 - Far, far from each other
04:15 - Where is it that our soul doth go
08:00 - Music when soft voices die

These songs, written in 1906-1907, are based on texts by poets Matthew Arnold, Heinrich Heine and Percy Bysshe Shelley.


Frank Bridge was born on 26 February 1879 in Brighton.
His father was a violin teacher and variety theatre conductor, formerly a master lithographic printer, ruled the household with a rod of iron, and was insistent that his son spend regular long hours practising the violin; when Frank became sufficiently skilled, he would play with his father's pit bands, conducting in his absence, also arranging music and standing in for other instrumentalists.
He studied at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford and played in a number of string quartets, including second violin for the Grimson Quartet and viola for the English String Quartet (along with Marjorie Hayward). He also often conducted, before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.

According to Benjamin Britten, Bridge had strong pacifist convictions, and he was deeply disturbed by the First World War. During the war and immediately afterwards, Bridge wrote a number of pastoral and elegiac pieces that appear to search for spiritual consolation; principal among these are the Lament for strings, Summer for orchestra, A Prayer for chorus and orchestra, and a series of pastoral piano works.

Bridge privately taught Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher's music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), based on a theme from the second of Bridge's Three Idylls for String Quartet (1906). However, Bridge was not widely active as a teacher of composition, and his teaching style was unconventional – he appears to have focused on aesthetic issues, idiomatic writing, and clarity, rather than exhaustive technical training. Britten spoke very highly of his teaching, saying famously in 1963 that he still felt he hadn't "yet come up to the technical standards" that Bridge had set him.
(Wikipedia)

Performers: Jean Rigby (mezzosoprano), Louise Williams (viola), David Owen Norris (piano)

Original audio:
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Score: https://imslp.org/wiki/3_Songs_for_Vo...)