Csanyi-Wills / Domnich / Londamis Ensemble / Eager Songs With Orchestra CD

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.

1. I. the 'Waldsee' Postcard 2. II. the Siege 3. III. the Last Letter 4. I. Farewell 5. II. Moonlit Heath 6. III. Carpenter's Son 7. IV. on the Idle Hill of Summer 8. V. White in the Moon 9. VI. As Through the Wild Green Hills of Wyre 10. Elegy for Our Time