The Hour Of Forgetting
Four songs for Soprano and Chamber ensemble to
poetry by Rupert Brooke.
The thread that connects these four songs is the night - its mixture
of strangeness and beauty, silence and odd noises. The first song opens
the door to this world - the hour of forgetting - with the ever-changing
hues of the sunset echoed in the texture of the ensemble. The opening of
the next song draws its idiom from the mysterious sounds of the night and
transforms them into the dynamic motion of the journey. In the third song
the Viola takes the lead - lamenting the folly of mankind and rebelling
against it. The last song is about the strange, the dreamlike, the surreal.
EVENING
[Lo], now, the splendour of sun-setting!
And the little fields are dim with mist.
Dewy and merciful through the shadows,
robed in purple amethyst,
Comes the hour of forgetting.
THE NIGHT JOURNEY
Night, smoky-scarv'd, with thousand-coloured eyes
Glares the imperious mystery of the way.
Thirsty for dark, you feel the long-limbed train
Throb, stretch, thrill motion, slide, pull out and sway,
Strain for the far, pause, draw to strengh
Again...
THE EARTH
Our mother the earth is weary; overhead
Blaze the great torches of the planets seven
The moon mist-laden rides the eastern heaven,
Westward the sun hath left the horizon red.
Those are immortal; from the earth is fled
The first clean rapture of her primal life.
She is sore grieved; laden with men's strife,
Woe of the living - Burden of the dead.
THE LIFE BEYOND
He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
[Who held the end was Death.] He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heaven. He lies;
And waits; [and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an
unknown hand, like a dry branch].