Adonis Images
Vocal score
Description
for soprano and piano
With specially written poems by Kãrlis Verdinš based on the Adonis chapters from Frazer's The Golden Bough, each song in this little cycle explores a single Affekt. The first is doleful and laden, the second aerated and evanescent, the third is static and expansive, with a hint of a march for the troops, while the fourth is spare and rather withdrawn. The fifth song is very brief and slightly enigmatic, leading to a final movement that tries to capture something of the poem's lush, but ultimately redemptive, grief.
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Programme Notes:
Adonis Images was originally called Aldington Images, and was a setting of a sequence of short poems by the English Imagist Richard Aldington. Earlier this year Karlis Verdinš, from Latvia, wrote six new poems (in English) to the existing music in a process akin to the 16th/17th century practice of contrafactum. (Contrafactum was the appending of vernacular words to Latin originals, or vice versa, turning madrigals into motets, or Marian antiphons into Anglican