Charles Stanford - Fairy Day, Op. 131 (1912)
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (30 September 1852 – 29 March 1924) was an Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at the University of Cambridge before studying music in Leipzig and Berlin. He was instrumental in raising the status of the Cambridge University Musical Society, attracting international stars to perform with it.
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Fairy Day: Three Idylls for Women's Chorus (1912)
Arranged by the composer with acc. of a small orchestra (1913)
Librettist: William Allingham
Fairy Dawn (Quasi Allegro molto moderato) (0:00)
Fairy Noon (Larghetto) (7:15)
Fairy Night (Allegretto tranquillo) (12:30)
Codetta and the Ulster orchestra conducted by Howard Shelley
Hyperion CDA68283
The ‘Three Idylls for Female Chorus and Small Orchestra’ which Stanford entitled Fairy Day, Op 131, were completed on 6 November 1912 in London and published in a vocal score by Stainer & Bell the following year. Settings of three poems from ‘Prince Brightkin’ in William Allingham’s Songs, Ballads, and Stories of 1874, the miniature cycle was dedicated ‘To the St Cecilia Society of New York and its Conductor Mr Victor Harris’. Harris was himself a composer, organist, teacher and conductor and spent much of his life working in New York. A vocal coach at the Metropolitan Opera for three years (1893–6), he founded the St Cecilia Chorus (as it was initially known) in 1906, made up exclusively of women’s voices (formed from a more informal Tuesday Morning Singing Club: an association of women who met regularly to sing at the Waldorf Astoria, the grand Art-Deco hotel in mid-town Manhattan, where they gave concerts). Harris probably commissioned the work from Stanford (although we have no evidence to confirm this at present) but there is no record of a performance by Harris who remained conductor of the Chorus until 1936. Fairy Day in this orchestral version was first broadcast by the BBC on 17 January 2011; the Ulster Orchestra and Ulster Youth Choir being conducted by Howard Shelley.
Jeremy Dibble © 2019
Stanford’s ‘Three Idylls’ were conceived as a cycle of three part-songs to words by his countryman, William Allingham (1824–1889), who was famous for his children’s poems, especially those relating to the imagination and the supernatural. His lines ‘Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting, For fear of little men’ from The Fairies, his most famous poem, became a classic, especially for schoolchildren. Scored with a gossamer precision reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the work reflects the composer’s consummate brilliance in this ‘Urlicht’ idiom, and one that looks forward to the transparent ballet music of his last opera, The Travelling Companion (1916). With only the resources of a chamber orchestra, Stanford created indelible musical illustrations of those memorable images by Edmund Dulac, Charles Edmund Brock (who illustrated Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies of 1910), Hilda Miller and Ida Outhwaite—gentle images in pale pastel colors with which many children grew up during much of the twentieth century.