Charles Villiers Stanford: Windy Nights

Windy Nights, from the song trio A Child’s Garland of Songs, published in 1982, displays both Stanford’s gift for melody and his sensitivity to text as well as his ability to compose music that creates a mood. Windy Nights echoes Schubert’s Erlkönig in its evocation of horse’s hooves, wind and menace.Charles Villiers Stanford was an Irish composer, music teacher and conductor who was a founder of the Royal Academy of Music, teaching composition to some of the greatest British composers of the twentieth century, among them Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. His own composition always displayed technical mastery, and for a while he was a great figure in the world of British musical theatre.