SKU: FP.FMJ02

ISBN 9790570503896.

A wonderfully balanced and yet contrasting set of songs for baritone voice and piano, inspired by Sir John Manduell’s long-standing love of French renaissance verse.

In the first, perhaps the most often quoted of Ronsard's poems, the poet invites young Mignonne to come and look at the purple rose and to realise that her beauty like the rose's will fade all too soon. Du Bellary's poem is redolent of late summer heat and haze as the thresher of the title calmly pursues his work. The Marot is a brief exercise in courteous mockery as the poet chides his ailing lady upon her gastronomic self-indulgence and warns her of the inevitable consequences upon her figure.

Finally published in 2013, Trois Chansons is one of the of the composer’s earliest surviving works, written while he was studying with the late Sir Lennox Berkely as a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music. The first performance was given by Beverley Humphreys at the Royal Academy of Music in 1956.

SKU: ST.Y272

ISBN 9790220222849.

1. Arrival Dream
2. Snow Squalls
3. It Happens
4. East Wind
5. A Clearer Memory

The contrasting aspects of nature are a major theme in the work of Rhian Samuel, and in her song cycle Spring Diary for baritone and piano she responds passionately to its vernal magic.

Beginning in dream and ending in memory, the five movements of the collection are a dramatic response to the turning season in Wales, conveyed through the fine detail of its characteristic weather and landscape as observed by the poet Anne Stevenson.

Premiered at London's City University, Spring Diary is excellent material for graduate singers and pianists, who will draw inspiration from its vivid and assured word-setting and substantial and evocative keyboard part.

SKU: ST.Y230

ISBN 9790220221736.

Commissioned with Arts Council of Wales funds by the School of European Studies, Cardiff University, for the centenary celebrations of Samuel Beckett's birth, The Flowing Sand is a setting of five poems by this seminal 20th-century modernist that are unified as a song-cycle by meaningful contrasts of mood and of musical style. The movements are 'what would I do', 'my way is in the sand', 'Da Tagte Es', 'Roundelay' and 'saying it again'. Artistically challenging, yet well within the technical range of enterprising conservatoire students, The Flowing Sand is a major addition to the repertoire of contemporary art-song by British composers, and a significant contribution to the celebrations of the writer's anniversary year.