As well as providing willow shoots for thatching, they doubled up as a meeting place for young lovers.

In a note on the poem, he said that he was trying to reconstruct an old song he had heard being sung by a woman in the village of Ballisodare in Sligo. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.

We are not told why but the presumption is that he tried to move too fast and so frightened her away. It first appeared under its present title when it was reprinted in Poems in The Pears-Britten version of this is mandatory, sung and accompanied as if in a timeless trance. It has been suggested that the location of the “Salley Gardens” was on the banks of the river at Ballysadare near Sligo where the residents cultivated trees to provide roof thatching materials. Down by the Salley Gardens has an unusual background for a song that has passed including Rebecca Clarke, John Ireland and Benjamin Britten also set the. Down by the Salley Gardens is a well-known Irish folk song – just one of the collection arranged by Benjamin Britten, and published in Words by William. Photo (c) Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service (Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery) The Salley Gardens. His piano partner is Marco Scolastra, one of Italy’s foremost accompanists and chamber music players.Grove Scene by John Crome. He sang at the London Royal Opera, Staatsoper Berlin, Opera Stuttgart, Vienna and numerous other famous opera houses. One of the most versatile tenors of his generation, Mark Milhofer is as much at home in the music of Rossini as in the repertoire of Monteverdi, Mozart or Benjamin Britten. Not being restricted by “authenticity” Britten had experimented with using folksongs as thematic material but deliberately lending them an unconventional, even quirky treatment that defies one’s expectations, putting put his own personal stamp on what are sometimes very familiar tunes. They became regular features of Britten and Pears’ recital programmes and continue to be widely performed today. So successful and useful did the first collection prove to be that Britten went on to make a further six volumes of arrangements, including French, Scottish and Irish as well as English folksongs, the last (for tenor and harp) dating from the very last year of his life. They also served well as encores and “lighter” material for his numerous recitals with Peter Pears. It was a way in which the then homesick composer could reconnect with his English roots. It was during Benjamin Britten’s stay in the United States in the early 1940s that he began to make his first arrangements of traditional folksongs. He began his musical career as a Choral Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, but subsequently became a student of Renata Scotto and Leyla Gencer in Rome a vocal versatility which is ideally suited to Britten’s song-writing. To this repertoire he brings a native facility and familiarity with the texts, and a keen sympathy also at work in his booklet essay for the collection. The recording is ideal’ (MusicWeb International). Each performer brings sincerity and enthusiasm to this varied repertoire. The tenor Mark Milhofer has previously taken part in Brilliant Classics surveys of the complete song output of Alban Berg (95549) and Francesco Tosti (Vol.1 – 95201), with the Berg attracting particularly enthusiastic praise: ‘Totally absorbing… convincingly performed from the first note to the last. However, the songs retain their place in the concert repertoire of many young singers, often as more than encore material, and they admit a rich variety of interpretative approaches. In cases such as The Foggy, Foggy Dew and O Waly, Waly, Britten’s arrangements have become better known than any ‘original’ version they have assumed the identity of the song in the popular imagination, and the distinctive voice of Pears singing them imprinted itself on the imaginations of countless music-lovers in the second half of the last century.

According to the tenor, Britten ‘wanted to recreate these melodies with their texts for concert performance, to make them art-songs … he therefore takes the tune as if he had written it himself and thinks himself back as to how he would turn it into a song.’ Thus the piano parts are no mere accompaniments but highly wrought, deftly illustrative comments on the texts and stories of love and country life. It was probably Peter Pears, Britten’s partner in music and life, who drew the composer’s attention to the rich heritage of English folksong and its attractions, as a way to introduce texture, variety and a lighter tone to their song recitals together during the 1940s.

Sally gardens britten