THREE SUSSEX SONGS (ARRANGED FOR SOPRANO AND PIANO) op.542 (November 2003)

Published by: Highbridge Music Ltd
Instrumentation: sop,pno
[Key to Abbreviations]
Note on Lyrics: Poems by Judith Garrett
Duration: 12:21
First Performance: Wigmore Hall, November 2003, Patricia Rozario, Howard Blake
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Movements

• 1: This is the delicate time of the year 4 minutes 21 seconds
  
• 2: I wait Through The Daylight Hours 4 minutes 02 seconds
  
• 3: The Dying Fall Of Summers Music 3 minutes 58 seconds
  

Notes

‘’In 1971 Howard Blake left London and retreated to the Sussex countryside to ‘work again at the basic pillars of harmony and counterpoint, develop a technique and language  with little in common with the then current practice....a neoclassical idiom with a strong sense of music as a cultural adhesive, rebonding a society fractured by modernism and its discontents’’ (Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Composers). Throwing himself wholeheartedly into this new environment he produced a flow of musical works for performing organizations nearby,  for musical colleagues who visited him, or in the case of these songs, by setting work of local poet Judith Garrett and performing it with the distinguished mezzo-soprano, Helen Watts, also living nearby. The poetry of Judith Garrett was taken up in the 1990s by Harry Eyres, poetry editor of The Daily Express, and many of her poems were then published. They are intensely evocative of the Sussex landscape and its seasons

The original version of the songs  was composed for Helen Watts and therefore pitched for mezzo-soprano. However, in 2003 the soprano Patricia Rozario chose to perform them at a Wigmore Hall concert on the occasion of Howard’s 65^th birthday with Howard himself as accompanist. The third song was transposed up a major third and certain changes made to the first two to make the cycle suitable for the soprano voice.

 

Performances

19th November 2003

Patricia Rozario (soprano), Howard Blake (piano), Wigmore Hall

Related Works

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