Utwory na płycie:

• Sonetto XVI
• Sonetto XXXI
• Sonetto XXX
• Sonetto LV
• Sonetto XXXVIII
• Sonetto XXXII
• Sonetto XXIV
• Four Songs of Youth Failure
• Four Songs of Youth Unfortunate
• Four Songs of Youth The Dance
• Four Songs of Youth Peace1914
• To Gratiana dancing and singing [Pavan]
• Songs for Achilles I In the Tent
• Songs for Achilles II Across the Plain
• Songs for Achilles III By the Sea
• Swan - I The lake is calm tonight
• Swan - II My first time in water
• Swan - III Then the year everything was swan
• Swan - IV The black swan of debt
• Swan - V Then the year everything was darkness
• Swan - VI ‘sing a swan of sixpence’
• Swan - VII [queen] Mother don’t eat me
• Swan - VIII I plucked each feather from myself

Britten:
Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op. 22
Browne:
To Gratiana dancing and singing
Gipps:
Four Songs of Youth
Thomas:
Swan
Tippett:
Songs for Achilles

In Jeremy Sams’ new English - language singing version of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the passionate sentiments are liberated from the safe historical distance of the Italian Renaissance and unveiled in a way that was not possible in 1940, when Britten wrote t he cycle – his first for his partner Peter Pears. Tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas presents it alongside Michael Tippett’s equally ardent Songs for Achilles and a short item by W. Denis Browne, a close friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, as well as premiere recording s of four Brooke settings by Ruth Gipps and a new song - cycle by Thomas himself, to poems by Andrew McMillan. Tackling themes of love, shame, acceptance, war and death, the programme traverses a history of male homosexuality from necessary discretion to the (relatively) liberated present.