Product Description
The history of this eleven-minute cycle is complex. The Song was written for Alison Wells and John Turner to perform at a 70th-birthday concert for Sir John Manduell in the Barbirolli Room in September 1998. Then on 13th May 1999, as Tim Williams telephoned me to commission a work for Psappha, I had the first of a series of mild seizures brought on not by Tims kind request but by some earlier disturbing information. Their effect, with its attendant amnesia, was to impart to the ensuing months a curious dreamlike quality, with an inner landscape in which the nightmare prose-poems of Aloysius Bertrands Gaspard de la Nuit chimed like ghostly bells. Bertrand was a contemporary of Chopin, and died, like him, of tuberculosis. Though he lived his brief adult life in Paris, the imagery is less Parisian than Dijonnais, for this was where Bertrand had spent his impressionable adolescence. I had waited over forty years to get to grips with their strange visions, and now, magically, they seemed very real. So the cycle of five poems I then chose was taken, with minor adaptations, from Book 3, ironically named La nuit et ses prestiges (Night and its glamours), and the completed work was first performed by Psappha with Alison Wells at Liverpool Hope University early in 2000, under the titleVers de Lune.
But I was still haunted by the sound of soprano and recorder, and needed to bring four of those five poems back into that sound-world hence what we have now: three short, ironic moon-visions, framing the two halves of the now complete Ondine poem, slightly adapted.
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