Sixteen songs and seven arias for high voice and Piano composed over a fifteen-year period from 1989 to 2004 with texts in English French German and translations from German Portuguese and Russian. Texts from theBible Shakespeare Mozart Rimbaud Fernando Pessoa and Paul Celan and by living writers Roger Pulvers Kevin Power Victoria Hardie and Michael Hastings. While the original text…

Hector Berlioz's Song Cycle (The Summer Nights) is based on poems by Theophile Gautier. Though their subjects have little direct connection each song possesses the sultry scented charm implied by Berlioz's title. The tenderly expressive qualities of these settings makes one wish that Berlioz had continued his dedication to French poetry. The English version of the text is given by Bernard Taylor…

Beethoven's song cycle To The Distant Beloved for Voice and Piano. Edited for this authoritative Henle Verlag Urtext edition by Helga Luhning from the original version for High Vocie and Piano. Includes full text andtranslations in German English and French.

Tristia is a song-cycle to words by Osip Mandelstam one of the founding members of the so-called Acmeist school of Russian poetry - a movement which has much in common with both Symbolism and Imagism. As a Jewish dissident who had survived the Russian Revolution of 1917 and fallen foul of the subsequent Soviet regime Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to get either recognition or employ…

Accompanied by one of Shostakovich’s most popular and accessible film-scores The Gadfly was a highly successful film inside the Soviet Union in its day a sugary and entertaining costume drama based on a once very popular historical novel by the English writer Ethel Voynich like a cross between ‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’. The hero is a swashb…