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.

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.

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.

A3 Size Score-Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth on 3rd March 1878 and spent most of his childhood in London. His holidays however were spent with relatives in Swindon and it was there that he developed his abiding love of all things rural. He was educated at St Paul's Hammersmith and was encouraged in his creative writing by James Ashcroft Noble whose daughter he secretly married after her father's death and to the great disapproval of her family. Despite growing anxiety over poverty ill health and literary discouragement which exacerbated a natural tendency to depression Thomas worked unstintingly as a reviewer and wrote and published over 30 books between 1897 and 1917.'Adlestrop' was written with four other poems between 7th and 9th June 1915. He enlisted in 1915 at the age of 37 and was called to the Front in 1917. He arrived at Arras on 9th February 1917 and was killed on the 9th April Easter Monday by a shell blast in the opening minutes of the offensive.This work for Soprano and Piano is set to the text of Edward Thomas.

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.

A work for Soprano and Piano. A setting of the text Eino Leino. Alternative title: 'Evening Prayer'

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.

The setting of a text by Geoffrey Chaucer for Soprano and Piano by George Dyson. Taken from The Canterbury Pilgrims - Dyson's full setting of The Canterbury Tales.

In memory of W.B.Yeats I (W.H.Auden)In memory of W.B.Yeats II (W.H.Auden)It's no go (Louis MacNeice)