These orchestral songs by the English composer Michael Csanyi-Wills - best known for his film music - all deal with the subject of loss. In Three Sogns: Budapest, 1944 Csanyi-Wills uses documentation from his own family history to shadow the fat of Hungary's Jews under the Nazis. One of them, "The Last Letter", sets a text written by his great-grandmother before she disappeared. Mortality is an omnipresent theme in A.E. Houseman's Shropshire Lad poems: Csanyi-Wills sets six songs, three for baritone and three for tenor. Elegy for Our Time sets an anguished lament by Jessica d'Este, sparked by death of her granddaughter in a car crash. Csanyi-Wills responds to the stimulus of these dark texts with music that is hauntingly lyrical and elegiac.

Tracklist:

3 Songs "Budapest, 1944": No. 1. The Waldsee Postcard
3 Songs "Budapest, 1944": No. 2. The Siege
3 Songs "Budapest, 1944": No. 3. The Last Letter
6 A.E. Housman Songs: No. 1. Farewell
No. 2. Moonlit Heath
6 A.E. Housman Songs: No. 3. Carpenter's Son
6 A.E. Housman Songs: No. 4. On The Idle Hill Of Summer
6 A.E. Housman Songs: No. 5. White In The Moon
6 A.E. Housman Songs: No. 6. As Through The Wild Green Hills Of Wyre
Elegy For Our Time

UPC: 5060113443298
Label: Toccata
Release Date: 1.8.16
Format: CD

Londamis Ensemble - Csanyi-Wills: Songs with Orchestra (CD)