Ivor Gurney doubly gifted as both poet and composer was born in 1890. The wonderful song cycle presented here was inspired by Gurney's discovery of William Bliss Carmen's poems in 1919. Carmen's poems were imaginative reconstructions of the surviving fragments of the nine volumes written by Sappho who was born in 612BC. Sappho is said to have been the leader of a band of maidens who worshipped Aphrodite Goddess of Love. Sappho's affections seem to have been directed exclusively at women and the sensuously erotic fragments that have come down through millennia to us tell of one of Sappho's passionate love affairs. This wonderful song cycle full of beauty andemotion transports us back to the isle of Lesbos and with words of great tenderness and beauty tells the story of a heady passionate all-consuming love that is so strong the pain of parting becomes overwhelming and almost too much to endure.

Composer performer and arranger Richard Rodney Bennett was internationally respected for his serious music and many award-winning film scores (Murder on the Orient Express Nicholas and Alexandra) as well as his works for children and his religious pieces. The playful and sensitive side of Bennett comes to the fore with this delightful setting of five songs of poems by Marjorie Fleming. Marjorie Fleming was a very young Scottish poetess who was born in Kirkcaldy in 1803 and died just eight years later leaving journals and a handful of poems. Her words are artless and evocative her spelling and language inventive. ‘Three Turkeys now their last have breathed And nowthis world forever leaved ’ she writes in A Melancholy Lay.This set of art songs is witty and poignant.