Sunday Playlist - 1/31/2021

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzrVlXh4mc1Ov1O-GTNAK12PO8Ju7Sssp

Last week we heard Will Liveright in a duet from a Bizet opera. This week, he sings one of Clinton Avenue’s favorites. His blues-inflected rendering of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” has given me new ideas in just the way that Iris Dementhe’s version did.

I have been prepping a poetry syllabus over the past week, which includes a section on death and the elegiac mode. Struggling with the fact of mortality, Keats wrote his “Ode to a Nightingale” not long after he witnessed his brother’s slow death to tuberculosis. The poet himself would eventually succumb to the disease. In the poem, Keats first longs for oblivion, but then he changes his mode of confronting his pain from wine to song. As Stephen Fry reads, note the reference to Ruth, when Keats imagines that the biblical heroine in her sorrow was touched by the same song as he.

The lyrics of the motet for six voices by Alonso Lobo are taken from the Book of Job—“My harp turns to grieving, and my flute to the voice of those who weep.” Listen to the highest soprano voice around 4:30, while all of the voices converge on the Latin for “for my days are as nothing.”

Again this week, we swerve to a bluegrass classic. “Drifting Too Far From the Shore” has many, many recordings, but this one wins for simplicity and sincerity. Ricky Skaggs plays mandolin and sings lead, John Starling play guitar and harmonizes. If you like it, let me know, and I’ll include other versions in the future.

We end with a plaintive melody for duduk, a double-reed wind instrument. Over a steady drone that serves as a ground, the Armenian master, Gevorg Dabagian, plays “A cool breeze is blowing.”