Dream-Songs (1986)

Richard Rodney Bennet (b 1936)

Dream-Songs (1986)

The Song of the Wanderer

The Song of the Shadows

Dream-Song

The Song of the Mad Prince

The de la Mare cycle Dream-Songs – written for Sasha Alexander and first performed by Sasha Abrams and Peter Alexander – is intended for solo voice or children in unison. Though necessarily modest in the vocal writing, the songs are no less magical as music than the words as poetry. The Song of the Wanderer is particularly effective in the way it first sets the piano in 9/8 and the voice in 3/4, brings them together in 9/8 for the radiant central climax where “the Phoenix goes” and then reverses the process to combine them in 3/4. In a tiny postlude the piano offers a distant echo of the 9/8 wanderer motif from the opening bars.

Taking a hint from the first line, “Sweep they faint strings, Musician,” the pianist arpeggiates the keyboard harmonies of the first part of The Song of the Shadows but then varies the articulation with a kind of pizzicato, the left hand occasionally doubling the vocal melody that is to be recalled towards the end. Another evening fantasy, Dream-Song has the lilt of a slow waltz except where disturbed by the peculiarly sinister imagery that momentarily intrudes in the middle. The Song of the Mad Prince is a sad but unfailingly melodious duet for the voice and the expressive right hand of the piano.