Rachmaninoff: "The Bells", op. 35

Frances Yeend, Robert Lloyd and Mack Harrell are the soloists with the Temple University Choir and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. 28 February 1954, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.

I. Allegro ma non tanto: "The Silver Sleigh Bells" (Слышишь, сани мчатся в ряд)
II. Lento: "The Mellow Wedding Bells" (Слышишь, к свадьбе зов святой) 6:00
III. Presto: "The Loud Alarm Bells" (Слышишь, воющий набат) 15:22
IV. Lento lugubre: "The Mournful Iron Bells" (Похоронный слышен звон) 23:23

Link to my Mack Harrell playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL207BD214799B2299

I. The Silver Sleigh Bells (Tenor solo and chorus)
Listen, hear the silver bells!
Silver bells!
Hear the sledges with the bells,
How they charm our weary senses with a sweetness that compels,
In the ringing and the singing that of deep oblivion tells.
Hear them calling, calling, calling,
Rippling sounds of laughter, falling
On the icy midnight air;
And a promise they declare,
That beyond illusion’s cumber,
Births and lives beyond all number,
Waits an universal slumber—deep and sweet past all compare.
Hear the sledges with the bells,
Hear the silver-throated bells;
See, the stars bow down to hearken, what their melody foretells,
With a passion that compels,
And their dreaming is a gleaming that a perfumed air exhales,
And their thoughts are but a shining,
And a luminous divining
Of the singing and the ringing, that a dreamless peace foretells.

II. The Mellow Wedding Bells (Soprano solo and chorus) 6:00
Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of tender passion their melodious voice foretells!
Through the night their sound entrances,
Like a lover’s yearning glances,
That arise
On a wave of tuneful rapture to the moon within the skies.
From the sounding cells upwinging
Flash the tones of joyous singing
Rising, falling, brightly calling; from a thousand happy throats
Roll the glowing, golden notes,
And an amber twilight gloats
While the tender vow is whispered that great happiness foretells,
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells, the golden bells!

III. The Loud Alarum Bells (Chorus) 15:22
Hear them, hear the brazen bells,
Hear the loud alarum bells!
In their sobbing, in their throbbing what a tale of horror dwells!
How beseeching sounds their cry
‘Neath the naked midnight sky,
Through the darkness wildly pleading
In affright,
Now approaching, now receding
Rings their message through the night.
And so fierce is their dismay
And the terror they portray,
That the brazen domes are riven, and their tongues can only speak
In a tuneless, jangling wrangling as they shriek, and shriek, and shriek,
Till their frantic supplication
To the ruthless conflagration
Grows discordant, faint and weak.
But the fire sweeps on unheeding,
And in vain is all their pleading
With the flames!
From each window, roof and spire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
Every lambent tongue proclaims:
I shall soon,
Leaping higher, still aspire, till I reach the crescent moon;
Else I die of my despair in aspiring to the moon!
O despair, despair, despair,
That so feebly ye compare
With the blazing, raging horror, and the panic, and the glare,
That ye cannot turn the flames,
As your unavailing clang and clamour mournfully proclaims.
And in hopeless resignation
Man must yield his habitation
To the warring desolation!
Yet we know
By the booming and the clanging,
By the roaring and the twanging,
How the danger falls and rises like the tides that ebb and flow.
And the progress of the danger every ear distinctly tells
By the sinking and the swelling in the clamor of the bells.

IV. The Mournful Iron Bells (Baritone and Chorus) 23:23
Hear the tolling of the bells,
Mournful bells!
Bitter end to fruitless dreaming their stern monody foretells!
What a world of desolation in their iron utterance dwells!
And we tremble at our doom,
As we think upon the tomb,
Glad endeavour quenched for ever in the silence and the gloom.
With persistent iteration
They repeat their lamentation,
Till each muffled monotone
Seems a groan,
Heavy, moaning,
Their intoning,
Waxing sorrowful and deep,
Bears the message, that a brother passed away to endless sleep.
Those relentless voices rolling
Seem to take a joy in tolling
For the sinner and the just
That their eyes be sealed in slumber, and their hearts be
Where they lie beneath a stone.
But the spirit of the belfry is a sombre fiend that dwells
In the shadow of the bells,
And he gibbers, and he yells,
As he knells, and knells, and knells,
Madly round the belfry reeling,
While the giant bells are pealing,
While the bells are fiercely thrilling,
Moaning forth the word of doom,
While those iron bells, unfeeling,
Through the void repeat the doom:
There is neither rest nor respite, save the quiet of the tomb!

Видео Rachmaninoff: "The Bells", op. 35 канала kadoguy