Tuesday Tones

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means I’m going to take a quick break from American Black composers. (Sadly, a brief attempt to locate Irish Black composers did not turn up much of anything at all. I did not dig super-deeply, though.) We’re going to dig back to the music of one Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer whose music has been overshadowed since his lifetime (1852-1924) by the likes of Edward Elgar and the British masters who followed. Stanford’s music is lyrical and Romantic, and it’s always pleasing. Not necessarily pleasant, as he brings a lot of good Romantic fire to his work, but pleasing. I’ve never heard a work of Stanford’s that left me thinking anything other than, “I’m glad I heard that.” This work is a good example. Stanford wrote six tone poems that he called “Irish Rhapsodies”, and this is the fourth of those. It is subtitled “The Fisherman of Lough Neagh”, and what a wonderful work it is–brooding and melodic and, in the end, just wonderfully triumphant.

As I was listening to this work, I read that George Bernard Shaw criticized Stanford’s music as lacking passion. I’m not sure what Shaw was listening to when he said that, because it sure as hell wasn’t this.