25. Crespo Series

25. Crespo Series
Earl Kim was a noted American composer of dazzling and austere works with a special link to the music theatre of Beckett, whose words are set in this short song cycle along with a Yeats excerpt and Nina’s monologue from Chekov’s Seagull. Britten’s Lachrymae is a set of variations on a sad love-song If my complaints could passions move, composed for Britten’s own instrument the viola. Here the harp replaces the piano. Bax’s Elegiac Trio for flute, viola and harp was composed in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Strangely it was composed at the same time as Debussy's Trio for the same unusual combination of instruments that follows, though neither composer knew of the other's work Debussy created a magical new world with the same instruments, composed at the height of the 1st World War, Debussy invents a delicate and sensuous world far, far removed from the slaughter in the trenches.