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Programme Note

These five songs for baritone and piano take love as their subject. All the poems set were probably written in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the songs in the cycle are also connected to each other by the musical material used.

The first four songs are concerned with some of the happier aspects of being in love, while the final song regrets that the splendour and bliss of love cannot last: it wanes like the “full-orbed” moon. Once Did I Breathe Another’s Breath was completed in November 2012.
Brian Elias