Art songs are poems set to music. Performed by renowned tenor John Hanks and pianist Ruth Friedberg, these digitally remastered recordings -- originally issued by Duke University Press on LP in 1965 and 1974 -- offer a vast treasure of American art song, beginning in the late nineteenth century and spanning much of the twentieth. The poems and lyrics on this CD include works by Dickinson, Poe, Browning, Wilde, Keats, Joyce, Tennessee Williams, Sandburg, cummings, Helen Bevington, Thomas Moore, Shakespeare, and William Blake. The composers include Ives, Barber, Copland, George Chadwick, Paul Bowles, William Klenz, and Charles Griffes. With the original recordings out of print, this double CD -- with revised and updated liner notes -- will make available the most comprehensive set of American art songs on CD for today's listeners.
