for soprano and piano. Par CASKEN JOHN. Chansons de Verlaine were completed in 2...(+)
for soprano and piano. Par CASKEN JOHN. Chansons de Verlaine were completed in 2006. The third song, Colloque sentimental, was written in 2003 for Alison Smart and Katharine Durran’s New French Song project. It was as a result of having written one short song to words by Verlaine that I subsequently decided to set two further poems to make a group of three.
All three were also set by Debussy: L’ombre des arbres and Chevaux de bois appear in Ariettes Oubliées, while Colloque sentimental belongs to Debussy’s second set of Fêtes Galantes. The poems I have grouped together are linked by the idea of three different landscapes. In the first, Verlaine precedes the words of his own sad, pale landscape with words from Cyrano de Bergerac about a nightingale who fears himself about to fall into a river and drown. In the second poem the landscape has been occupied by a fairground where men, women and children watch as the hobby-horses go round and round before night falls and the church tolls a passing-bell. The third poem takes us into an old park where two ghosts recall their past. The one wonders if the other remembers the happy days of their past lives, but the other doesn’t want to remember, barely acknowledging the closeness they once shared, seeing only that ‘hope has fled, defeated, towards the dark sky.’ I am very grateful to Roger Nichols and Dominique Mols for their advice with the setting of the French texts and with the translations.
John Casken
Colloque sentimental was first performed by Alison Smart and Katherine Durran at the Purcell Room in London on 13 July 2004/ Répertoire / Soprano et Piano
This work was commissioned by the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts Ltd....(+)
This work was commissioned by the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts Ltd. with theaid of funds provided by the John S. Cohen Foundation and the PRS Foundation. The firstperformance was given by Rachel Nicholls and Paul Plummer at St. Andrew’s Church Presteigne on 29 August 2005.Composer's NoteGladestry Quatrains is a setting of 12 short poems by Jo Shapcott from her collection of the same title. It originated in a project for the 2003 Presteigne Festival called A Garland for Presteigne in which 10 composers associated with the Festival were asked to write a short song each celebrating the Welsh border country the choice of poetryranged widely and I chose two of Jo Shapcott’s evocative miniatures (still adding up to slightly less than the timing I had been requested to provide!). As I wrote them I started to make sketches for some more settings from the same collection and the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts very kindly commissioned this new larger song-cycle proper for their 2005 Festival. The original pair of poems form the third (Gwaithla Brook) and last (Cefn Hir) of the songs in which the eighth combines two poems Burl Hill and Newchurch. Throughout I have been aware of the sights and sounds of nature the character of the landscape and the sense of history and timelessness of this beautiful part of the world as reflected in Jo Shapcott’s poetry as well as (I hope) the wit and directness of her expression. The whole work though it has eleven songs still lasts only about 20 minutes the concision of the texts and the need to find musical equivalents to this was an important part of the concept of the piece. John McCabe 2005
Commissioned by and written for Nicola Walker Smith in October 1992 this set of...(+)
Commissioned by and written for Nicola Walker Smith in October 1992 this set of songs takes as its starting point material from The Upside-Down Violin at Expo ’92 in Seville by The Michael Nyman Band and the Orquestra Andalusi de Tetuoan. The Moroccan orchestra plays only monophonically and consequently I wrote a ‘pure’ melody line - that is one not built on harmony. The harmonic content of Anne de Lucy Songs is thus derived from the melody for the first time in my work. The text is an ode to the great Renaissance theorist and musical speculator Salinas by Fray Luis de Leon.
