Poetry Cafe 136 Birds in Spring

Birds of Spring (Cuckoo, Blackbird, Skylark, Nightingale)

Playlist: texts read & music played:-

1. Song of Blackbird
2. Heine/ Schumann: ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai…’ (from Buch der Lieder, 1827/ Dichterliebe, 1840)
3. ‚Sumer is icumen in‘ (late 12th. c.)
4. Walter von der Vogelweide: ‘Unter der linden an der heide…’
5. Beethoven: Symphony no. 6 (‚Pastoral‘), end of 2nd. movement
6. Delius: ’On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring’
7. Paul McCartney: ‘Blackbird’
8. John Drinkwater: ‘My Blackbird Bountiful’
9. Song of Blackbird
10. Extracts from books on British birds
11. Ravel: ‘Oiseaux Tristes’ (from ‘Miroirs’)
12. Rossini: ‘La Gazza Ladra’/ ‘The Thieving Magpie’ (overture)
13. Virginia Woolf: ‘The Waves’ (extracts)
14. Shakespeare: ‘Venus and Adonis’ (extract)
15. John Clare: ‘The Skylark’
16. Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘To a Skylark’
17. George Meredith: ‘The Lark Ascending’
18. Vaughan Williams: ’The Lark Ascending’
19. Song of skylark
20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘The Nightingale’
21. BBC Recording (May 19, 1942): song of a nightingale heard against drone of RAF Bombers
22. Songs of nightingale
23. T.S. Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’ (ll. 100-103)
24. John Keats: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
25. Respighi: ‘Gli Uccelli’ (‘The Birds’): Nightingale
26. Respighi: ‘Pini di Roma’ (‘Pines of Rome’): 3rd movement
27. Robert Bridges: ‘Nightingales’
28. Nat King Cole: ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’