Christina Rossetti’s poem The Birthday or My Heart is Like a Singing Bird was published in 1857 and was the subject of at least a dozen musical settings before Hubert Parry. Parry had developed the habit by this point of memorizing a text and ‘cogitating’ on it before beginning composition.In this song Parry employs rippling semiquaver movement in both hands to establish the ecstatic nat…

This is a spellbinding collection of ten songs by English composer Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Over the entire course of his life he wrote a vast number of works based on English Lyric poems; often concerning Love Romance; and this volume represents just a small portion of his remarkable output. This is the second book in the series and contains settings of songs for High Voice with Piano…