Forces: Tenor, horn, strings
Duration: 20 minutes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
A setting of poems by Geoffrey Hill, for tenor, horn, and strings.
Programme note:
These four settings are, in some sense. ‘In Memoriams’. The often simple and always very strong visual images were what particularly tempted the composer to set them: each song is dominated by one such image expressed in differing string textures and by differing uses of the solo horn; harsh chords, clustered semitones and proliferating ornamentation in the first song; a static block of sound for violins in 12 parts for the second, contrasting with more intimate counterpoint for a solo group of viola, two cellos and bass; the third song uses violent arpeggios, glissandi and flourishes, and, as a contrast, in the final the strings are mainly absent altogether. The strings are thus largely used for the atmospheric background to solo voice and horn. In addition to providing a foil to the voice, the horn helps to characterize each poem — heroic and wide-ranging in the first and third; claustrophobic in the second where it obsessively sticks to repeating one note right up to the last three lines; and in the final song where it entwines in lyrical canon with the voice. This last song is very simple and the only one of the four which uses the voice in a lyrical rather than declamatory style.
©Gordon Crosse
Gordon Crosse 