Music I love: The Dreame

The year 1995 saw a bunch of Jane Austen film adaptations. Pride and Prejudice was made into a six-part miniseries by A&E and the BBC, while Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility were produced as feature films. (Emma, a fluffy but earnest adaptation starring Gwynneth Paltrow in the title role, was filmed the following year, as well.) P&P was the definitive production of that novel, while Persuasion is perhaps my favorite Austen adaptation.

But this blog entry is about S&S; more specifically, it is about one of the songs for that production. The movie itself was very well-written, brilliantly acted (Emma Thompson was the lead role of Elinor Dashwood, with Kate Winslet as the impulsive younger sister Marianne), and solidly directed. Just a great production overall, with some really beautiful music. Two of the songs were sung by a relatively unknown (to American audiences, at least) soprano named Jane Eaglen. (Ms. Eaglen gained much greater notoriety, and then suffered some health setbacks. She is currently an artist-in-residence at UW, so she's local. I think she sung a minor role in the Seattle Opera Company's last production.)