Description

Songs and Haiku is a previously unreleased collection of songs for mezzo-soprano and piano, published to mark what would have been Jonathan Harvey’s 80th birthday in 2019. Two haiku (the first for piano alone the only piece here to have been published before the latter by Basho) bookend three love songs dedicated to Harvey’s wife Rosa. The grouping of the pieces into a 8-minute cycle was the composer’s own idea, and it mixes Eastern and Western poets in a totally characteristic manner. Both Tagore and E. E. Cummings are represented, poets who feature in some of Harvey’s finest works (Song Offerings and Forms of Emptiness, respectively), and a third song sets Tennyson’s ‘NowSleeps the Crimson Petal’.