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Programme Note

The text of the piece is taken from the poem 'Whoever Finds a Horseshoe' by the Jewish-Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin's prisoner camps in 1938. I have used the lines in the original Russian text that spoke most strongly to me, both in terms of meaning and in terms of musically interesting sound combinations (the Russian language is full of them!). For those of us who do not understand Russian, small fragments of the English translation are heard now and then to give us hints of the multifaceted pictures of this fascinating poem.