Although the poem ''A Clear Midnight'' invokes soul power with a similar exuberance, Vaughan Williams's setting is quizzical and wistfully tender. Listen to some of the best new recordings here.īut two songs by Stanford's pupil Ralph Vaughan Williams show an entirely different, modern sensibility.

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Instead, he put together a program of songs striking for their sensual and revealing responses to Whitman's verse.įrom Lil Nas X to Mozart to Esperanza Spalding here is what we loved listening to this year. In making his final selection, he did not always choose the most notable names or even the most accomplished composers. Hampson examined them all, uncovering many forgotten works and inviting colleagues to compose more. Some 400 are for voice and piano, and in preparing this project, Mr. Hampson, who has made a specialty of American song, estimates that there are more than 1,200 musical settings of Whitman texts.

Hampson's disk shows once again how literary and engrossing vocal music can be when it is truly at the service of poetry. A great art song should rivet one's attention on the words the composer becomes a literary commentator. Yet all have something to say with music about Whitman, whose words fire these songs and this recording. Some of the composers are first-rate others, far from it. Works were composed specifically for this project by Robert Strassburg, Craig Urquhart and the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. This fascinating program, with Craig Rutenberg as pianist, offers 22 songs, all settings of Whitman texts, by 17 American and British composers and the German-born Kurt Weill. Hampson writes in collaboration with the scholar Carla Maria Verdino-Sullword in the booklet of the new release ''To the Soul: Thomas Hampson Sings the Poetry of Walt Whitman'' (EMI Classics 55028-2 CD). ''Whitman was blessed with an extraordinary ear for inner rhythms, which he then articulated in the radically free, rolling, thrusting verses which revitalized the entire world of poetic language,'' Mr. Just ask the esteemed American baritone Thomas Hampson, a perceptive reader of Whitman. Yet for Whitman enthusiasts, the great poet pulled it all off, and then some.

A MYSTIC, A MODERNIST, A radical liberationist, a joyous narcissist, an Aquarian prophet, the Bard of Democracy: Walt Whitman could perhaps be accused of overreaching.

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