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Dorothy Buchanan  

An Ocean Between Us

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 2006
for mezzo-soprano and piano quartet

Gillian Whitehead  

Bright Forms Return

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 1980
for mezzo-soprano and string quartet

  • Programme Note

    Bright Forms Return written in 1980 while I was composer-in-residence for Northern Arts (UK), is one of the first pieces I wrote that is concerned with landscape (and sea-scape). I was living in Northumberland, on the moors north of Newcastle, very near the house where Kathleen Raine had spent her childhood. When I was asked to write a piece for the Cumbria Quartet and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Lamb, Raine’s poetry was an obvious choice, as its northern imagery was very familiar to me.

    Although the piece is designed as a single entity, the quartet falls into four clearly-defined sections in its setting of the four short poems. The vocal writing is relatively simple (rhythmically at least), and the writing for the quartet sometimes reflects the poetic imagery or mood, and is sometimes derived from the formal structure of the poems. The text, which comes from The Oval Mirror published by Hamish Hamilton, is used with the kind permission of the author and her publishers.

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Ronald Tremain  

Four Medieval Lyrics

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1965
for mezzo-soprano and string trio

  • Programme Note

    Four Medieval Lyrics is a song cycle of settings of 14th and 15th century religious and secular verse. The fusion of old and new, of medieval poetic imagery with 20th century musical language offers rich possibilities. Not only the scholar plunders the past, but the composer too, making that past accessible to our modern sensibility. This poetry is distant enough to be treated with a certain detachment and objectivity; at the same time the lyrics have a delicacy, a freshness a restraint which can still speak to us today.
    (from Words and Music an essay by Ronald Tremain, November 1988)

    The text settings of this work are interspersed with fantasia for the strings; these use both metered and unmetered notation.

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Ross Harris  

To the memory of I.S. Totzka

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1998
for soprano soloist with chamber nonet

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