When sending off some music for the library at the Royal School of Music, I found The Starlight Night, a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Elaine Hugh-Jones. I remembered how dramatic this setting is and made a plan to learn it. I can see easily why Elaine would choose to set this poem.
The opening lines would have captured her vivid
imagination: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
On looking through the records I found this review to share with you.
Review of The Starlight Night by Colin Scorr-Sutherland
A most beautiful setting of a difficult poet. The thing that strikes me most of all is the capture of the mood of ecstasy — that rare expressiveness that is so absent from music — indeed, from all the arts today.
(Hugh-Jones) Starlight Night is an expansive, adventurous setting that is yet within our perceptions of expression — we can understand it and not only that, can feel where (the composer), in understandable language (is) taking us — way beyond into those realms into which music penetrates as does no other art.