This piece is scored for Soprano and Piano. A Penny for a Song was written in Autumn 1981 for Penny Price Jones and Philip Martin who commissioned it with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It consists of ten songs prefaced by a piano piece which acts as a refrain heard again between Nos. 6 and 7 and before the last song.All the texts are miniatures; some are haiku a Japanese Zen poetic form and they all have in common a number of Haiku characteristics such as vivid imagery seasonal or natural and allusive brevity. The poems are small but they have a resonance extending far beyond themselves. Zen artists love to play with space: through afew brush strokes they conjure up a world of detail; they suggest infinitely expanding space through the implications of a few lines on a nearly empty background. This has been my approach in the music of A Penny for a Song. The songs are fleeting momentary; they are echoes of a world that is always there if we stop to listen for it.

In this small-scale song cycle Taverner coloured his melodic Soprano lines with Eastern European and Slavic flavour. At some points the composer interplayed the Piano line with the sung melody and at other times used the Pianoas drone and allows the Vocal line to soar above. The ‘love’ of the title is according to the composer ‘the notion of Eros raised to the divine ’ and the texts are written mostly by monks.John Tavener was that rare creature acomposer of serious music and serious religious music who has also achieved commercial success. He burst into the popular consciousness with the performance of his Song for Athene at the funeral of Princess Diana but had been ahighly respected and frequently-performed composer since the premiere of his dramatic cantata The Whale in 1968.

All the songs in The Voice of Desire are conversations between humans and birds. In each case the birds seem to have a more sophisticated viewpoint that their human hearers.One of the highlights is Written OnTerrestrial Things set in a dead landscape at the dead of winter. Suddenly a joyus thrush melody breaks out it's ecstatic expression is completely at odds with human perceptions of such a dismal evening has nature somethingto remind us if only we'd listen. The song cycle was commissioned by the BBC for Alice Coote and first performed by her and Julius Drake (piano) in a BBC Proms Chamber Music concert in London on 11 August 2003.

Salmer Og Aandelige Sange ias a collection of Sacred Songs And Hymns by early 20th Century Danish composer Carl Nielsen who is one of the most important and free-spirited of the generation of composers who straddle the 19th and 20th centuries. If Nielsen's chamber and orchestral music epitomizes the exploratory growth-orientated side of his nature his songs contain the essence of his search for the ‘simple original’. Arranged for Piano Vocal and Guitar.