I have Swann's Tolkien settings. They are pretty cool.
I was able to track those down! I'm not yet sure how I feel about some of the original settings with William Elvin, which are much more Romantic art song than English folk—I just hurt myself by imagining Benjamin Britten in the Shire—but his own version of "Bilbo's Last Song" went definitive for me about two bars in. There is also the fact that, although I don't have the CD's liner notes, it looks as though Swann recorded the song in 1993. He died in '94. I will have trouble disentangling the song from him now.
The concert revival of Perelandra, alas, remains inaccessible, unless you're in Oxford or Illinois. I assume recordings exist of the original 1964 staging, but I also assume they're in private hands and/or buried in copyright. Someone should just film Perelandra already; I know it would make rushthatspeaks happy, and then maybe I could hear the opera.
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I was able to track those down! I'm not yet sure how I feel about some of the original settings with William Elvin, which are much more Romantic art song than English folk—I just hurt myself by imagining Benjamin Britten in the Shire—but his own version of "Bilbo's Last Song" went definitive for me about two bars in. There is also the fact that, although I don't have the CD's liner notes, it looks as though Swann recorded the song in 1993. He died in '94. I will have trouble disentangling the song from him now.
The concert revival of Perelandra, alas, remains inaccessible, unless you're in Oxford or Illinois. I assume recordings exist of the original 1964 staging, but I also assume they're in private hands and/or buried in copyright. Someone should just film Perelandra already; I know it would make