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Anthony Ritchie  

A Poem Just for Me

 Year: 1988
arranged by Anthony Ritchie for soprano, baritone and piano

Kit Powell  

Father's Telescope

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1989
a playful music theatre piece for singer, speaker and tape about power and submission

Jack Body  

Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1982
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, voice, and a dancer

  • Programme Note

    The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo I wrote for Michael Parmenter, with whom I worked on a programme entitled Between Two Fires (also included was a dance-theatre work I created collaboratively with Michael, using his voice as well as his body, with imagery extracted from the diaries of Franz Kafka.) At the time I was focused on different styles of melody, having just completed my Five Melodies for Piano. Inspired by the lovely voices of some of the then current students in our School of Music, I felt that women’s voices gave the expressive quality I wanted, as well as providing a useful ‘cover’ for the overtly homo-erotic tenor of the texts. The original production used film, shot by my good friend Bayley Watson, showed the dancer’s prostrate figure, swathed in bandages. As the performance unfolded the cloth was gradually cut and pealed back by hands belonging to an old man whose face we never saw, the intended metaphor being of the sculptor cutting away marble to reveal the male form that he sensed already existed within the stone.

    The work has since had other performances that have discarded the theatrical elements, most successfully when each setting is prefaced by a reading of the poem in translation.

    These settings of some of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s most personal sonnets articulate the anguish of love and desire, as well as the despair of old age. The musical style combines the theatricality of Italian bel canto with the direct expressivity of folksong.

  • Availability

Gillian Whitehead  

The Virgin and the Nightingale

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 1986
five songs for voices

  • Instrumentation
    sop, m-sop,A,T,Bari,B choir or sextet. Optional melody instrument - flute. If one soprano has a virtuoso high light voice that could undertake the flute line, the upper voices in 1 and 5 can be rearranged between soprano 2 and alto.
  • Programme Note

    The Virgin and the Nightingale was commissioned by Jones and Co with funding from the Music Board of the Australia Council, and first performed by The Song Company in 1992. The poems are taken from Fleur Adcock’s collection of translations of mediaeval poems published by Bloodaxe Books as The Virgin and the nightingale, with kind permission of author and publisher. The five songs all focus on birds; the flute part in Love’s Agent is a (transposed) transcription of a nightingale song. The settings are for SSATTB choir. The songs can be performed as a set or separately; some of them are suitable for choir.

  • Availability

Pepe Becker  

When Will We Know

Duration: 03' 00" Year: 1986
For soprano solo, two sopranos and two altos