Four Songs (2004)

Is it for now

To write one song

Ad Infinitum

The Revelation

André Previn’s solo vocal pieces - not all of them strictly classifiable as song - were conceived with particular singers in mind, female singers more often than not. Beginning with the Five Larkin Songs for Janet Baker in 1977, a fascinatingly varied repertoire has been developed through collaboration with an array of distinguished musicians, including Kathleen Battle, Sylvia McNair, Renée Fleming, Barbara Bonney… The present Four Songs are exceptional in that they were written for a tenor, Anthony Dean Griffey, who created the role of Mich in Previn’s opera A Streetcar Named Desire and who gave the first performance of these Larkin and Williams setting with the composer at the piano in the Zankel Hall, New York, in October 2004.

The most formal and at the same time the most lyrical of the Four Songs is the first one, “Is it for now.” Larkin’s opening line is set to a lilting melody which is not only echoed in the piano part but is also - as the initial tempo returns after a comparatively dramatic middle section and a climactic exclamation of “Shine out, my sudden angel” - literally recalled in the symmetrically placed closing section. The other songs are more characteristic Previn settings, which is to say that they conform to no formal scheme. Although the chromatic rising figures in the piano part at the beginning of “To Write One Song” are heard again at the end, the vocal line and the piano harmonies elsewhere, like the sombre fourths where “the mourners tread,” are freely made reflections of the images in the text.

The first of the Williams settings “Ad Infitum” also echoes its beginning at the end, its minor thirds in the right hand and its arpeggio figures in the left, but the middle section with its crumpled flower figuration, is entirely pragmatic. So too is the whole of “The Revelation,” which is a spontaneous reaction, with an agitated piano part and a wide-spaced vocal line, to an exhilarating and yet poignant situation.