nach Gedichten von Hermann Hesse-After emigrating from Berlin at the age of 16 the Jewish composer Ursula Mamlok wrote Four German Songs in 1958 while studying at the Manhattan School of Music. Based on texts from Hermann Hesse's collection Vom Baum des Lebens the songs reflect the uprooting from home. Mamlok juxtaposes Hesse's melancholy with an intensive tonal image which proceeds from expressionism with short motifs and tonal transgression yet ventures into new spheres of expression.

Baritone. This volume contains French operatic arias for baritone from works that opera reformer Christoph Willibald Gluck was commissioned to compose for the Paris Opéra: ?Iphigénie en Aulide? (1774) | ?Cythère assiégée? (1775) | ?Alceste? (1776) | ?Armide? (1777) | ?Iphigénie en Tauride? (1779). The informative text sections contain a Foreword (Fr/Eng), a brief account of the dramatic context and a literal English translation of each aria. About the series: Christoph Willibald Gluck: French Operatic Arias. For the first time all the arias from Christoph Willibald Gluck?s French operas are being published in arrangements for voice and piano. This series, a coproduction with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (CMBV), presents this collection according to voice register in four volumes. With their wealth of arias and informative texts, these volumes offer a rich treasure-trove from works by this major 18th-century opera composer for use in voice lessons, auditions and recitals.

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

‘Eleven-Fifty’ is the fourth of seven separate songs to various poets written byLennox Berkeley in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They were grouped together forconvenience as Opus 14 No. 2.‘The Beacon Barn’ thethird of these songs also has a text by Patrick O’Malleywho according to Tony Scotland was ‘one of the First World War poets whoserved as a private in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers’. ‘Eleven-Fifty’ was composed inApril1938 and is a brief glorification of a high-speed train where the moto perpetuoaccompaniment barely stops. Berkeley admired Honegger bought a copy of thescore of his railway depiction Pacific 231 in 1924 andreviewed enthusiastically an all-Honegger concert conducted by the composer in Paris (‘A Paris Letter’ The MonthlyMusical Record June 1929).