A Lover's Gift — From Her to Him in Music, Poetry & Prose, Naxos (Audio CD)

Vadonatúj! Gyári csomagolásban! Fóliázott! Mint a képen! Vásároljon bizalommal! Foliaban!

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Product Details

• UPC: 730099462020
• Label: Naxos
• Contributors: Read by Laura Paton; texts selected by Heather Godwin
• Featured Music: Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Elgar
• Featured Writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Katherine Mansfield, William Shakespeare, and others
• Catalogue Number: 8.553620
• Release Year: 1995
• Genre: Spoken Word / Poetry & Prose Anthology, with Classical Music
• Country of Producing: [confirm — no "Made in" line visible in provided photos]

Product Features

• Format: Audio CD, factory sealed
• Recording: DDD (fully digital)
• Total Playing Time: 1:17:47
• Cover Art: The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

Overview

A Lover's Gift is built around a simple, well-chosen idea: love is easier to feel than to say, so let other people's words carry it. This is the "from her to him" half of a pair (Naxos also issued a companion volume in the reverse direction), collecting some of the most eloquent writing on romantic love in English — Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets, Katherine Mansfield's prose, Shakespeare's Juliet — read by Laura Paton and threaded through with excerpts from Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, and Elgar.

The concept sits somewhere between an audiobook and a mood album: not a narrative to follow start to finish, but a curated sequence meant to be dipped into, or played through as a single continuous listen. Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" (quoted on the front cover) sets the emotional register the whole disc works from — earnest, direct, unembarrassed about big feeling.

It's an easy gift-shelf pick: a genuine love-poetry compilation with real literary weight behind it, rather than a generic "romantic classics" filler disc.

Interesting Facts

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, quoted on this disc, were originally written as private love letters in verse to her husband, poet Robert Browning, before she was persuaded to publish them.
• This release pairs literary readings with orchestral and operatic excerpts rather than song settings — the music comments on the mood of the text rather than setting it directly.
• Naxos released this as one half of a companion pair, with a matching volume addressed in the opposite direction (from him to her), both drawing on the same era of Naxos's spoken-word catalogue.
• The reader, Laura Paton, and producers Nicolas Soames and Sarah Butcher worked across several Naxos spoken-word and poetry anthology titles in the mid-1990s.
• The cover reproduces Gustav Klimt's The Kiss (1907–08), one of the most recognizable images of romantic love in Western art, tying the disc's Golden Age Vienna elegance to its literary content.

Publishers

Released by Naxos, © & ℗ 1995 HNH International Ltd. Texts selected by Heather Godwin; produced by Nicolas Soames and Sarah Butcher; speech engineering by Alan Smyth, Bucks Audio Cassettes.

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