28. Crespo Series

Britten wrote five Canticles over a period of thirty years, the first ones coinciding with his time of greatest success with his operatic masterpieces and the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival. The first Canticle is the only one to have a direct link to the Biblical Song of Solomon, being a setting of the seventeenth century elaboration of My Beloved is mine and I am his. Still Falls the Rain is taken from Edith Sitwell's The Canticle of the Rose, whose dark, war-laden text is an allegory of Christ's passion, a text that conveys courage and light seen through horror and darkness. Both Canticle III and the Schubert song call upon a horn to join singer and pianist. Vaughan Williams summons a string quartet to add body and drama to the six pastoral poems by A.E.Housman that open with a storm on Wenlock Edge.