The big news this week was the birth of Prince George Alexander Louis, the new Duke of Cambridge. Plenty of sleepless nights certainly await the Royal parents; so this new collection of lullabies may be just what the royal doctor ordered.
The first lullabies were modest songs, sung or hummed by parents rocking their babies to sleep. In 2011, after the birth of violinist Rachel Barton Pine's first child, she could find no existing collection of classical violin lullaby scores. So she started gathering sheet music from libraries around the world and recording her own versions with pianist Matthew Hagle.
Familiar tunes and new discoveries mesh on her recent CD, Violin Lullabies, celebrating the beauty of new life and parenthood. The CD features 25 lullabies from composers such as Schubert, Fauré, Strauss and Ravel, and includes George Gershwin's "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess and the famous "Brahms's Lullaby."
Watch Rachel perform "Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht" ("Good evening, good night"), Op. 49, No. 4, published in 1868 and widely known as "Brahms's Lullaby."
http://youtu.be/Hg-kwDiWg3M
Jill speaks with Rachel about the CD, its origins, and the notion that these lullabies are really beautiful concert pieces, as sophisticated as the more standard works from any of these composers.
Crossover, Saturday morning at 11:30 am on WRTI, with an encore the following Friday evening at 7 pm on HD-2 and the All-Classical stream at wrti.org.