bar – pno OR bar – strings (6.4.3.2.1 minimum)

Piano version:

String orchestra version:

Echoes (2015)
baritone and piano or baritone and string orchestra (15’)

1. Interior
2. Echoes I
3. Forgetfulness
4. Echoes II
5. Exile (after the Chinese)
6. Echoes III
7. Postscript

The American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) lived a short and troubled life, beset by feuding parents, persecution for his open homosexuality and poverty resulting from his uncompromising devotion to his art, leading to suicide at sea three months shy of his thirty-third birthday. The early uncollected poems I have chosen to set, some written in Crane's teens, inhabit a crepuscular world where remnants of the past linger in a kind of twilit limbo. Remembrances of old relationships meet objects of uncanny symbolic import, and an atmosphere of haunted nostalgia pervades. The three epigrammatic 'Echoes' are echoes in a literal sense too since they are each a transformation of musical material from the preceding song. In the valedictory 'Postscript', to the strains of a sad and half-remembered waltz, the poet offers a summary of the whole cycle:

“Mine is a world foregone though not yet ended, -”

Commissioned by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams with support from the Britten-Pears Foundation and first performed by the singer and pianist Paula Fan at the Dixon Recital Hall at Tulane University, New Orleans on 8th October 2015