Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Candlemas Eve (Revisited)

How good is this! The Candlemas poem by Robert Herrick I posted the other day, set to music ... Candlemas Eve, sung by English folk singer Kate Rusby. It is a track on her Christmas album, Sweet Bells, and is available from iTunes (in the UK, at least).

Although it is a bit late for this year, another lovely piece of music for Candlemas is the version of the Nunc Dimittis (the song of Simeon) by Geoffrey Burgon. It was originally written as music for the TV show Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. You can hear samples and download it from Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic. The version I have is sung by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, which you can find here (UK) and here (US); an alternative is the original TV theme sung by English soprano Lesley Garrett (UK and US). There are also a number of different versions on iTunes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love the Herrick poem (just spotted a bit of Holly behind the crucifix- oops!) and I love Kate Rusby! I must get her new album!
And I must drop round here more often to see all yuor great ideas :-)