Richard Stokes (1)

This book is the bee's knees if you're interested in French vocal music. I've been working on some Poulenc just now; the translations here have opened my eyes to how cryptic and deceptive French colloquialisms as used in modern poetry can be. If you're not a native speaker and you need to decipher, say, some Apollinaire to sing, you aren't going to make it with a Collins Abridged. The composer biographies/evaluations are chatty, slightly eccentric, fun to read and wear their subjectivity on their sleeves. Songs about cats are meticulously underlined.… (mehr)