Composer's Notes:Heavenly Things is my fourteenth song-cycle but the first with piano accompaniment. I mention this because when I was asked to write this piece my first reaction was ‘what can I make of amedium that seems to me quintessentially 19th century’ and I was doubtful that I could produce anything that I would be happy with. Then I went to hear Christopher Maltman and Malcolm Martineau and was so impressed by the magicand intensity of their performance that I saw a ‘way in’ to what at first had seemed a problem. The choice of poems was obviously going to be crucial and I chose the Donne Holy Sonnets because of the dramatic possibilities theyoffer and the huge range of emotion that they encompass. In these settings the piano is always more than a mere accompaniment it tends either to be in dialogue with the voice or to have its own musical agenda which the voicereacts to in an independent but parallel way. Geoffrey Burgon

The subtitle of this work dedicated to Christian Gerhaher, '23 sentences by Nikolaus Lenau', should be taken literally: some of the texts in Heinz Holliger's setting consist of only a few words. With relentless focus on essential elements, the texts are a distillation of the sensation which has been recorded in literary history as 'world-weariness'. Holliger reflects this concentrated emotion, presenting the singer and pianist with the highest level of technical demands within an extremely limited space, never as an end in itself but always as means to an extreme compression of musical and emotional expression. / Baryton Et Piano