As part of the Faversham Assembly Rooms recital series, Leonora Dawson-Bowling and Benedict Lewis-Smith will perform two song cycles, Barber’s ‘Hermit Songs’ and Copland’s ’12 Poems of Emily Dickinson’.

The ‘Hermit Songs’ use as their source a collection of anonymous poems written by Irish monks and scholars from the 8th to the 13th centuries, in translations by W. H. Auden, Chester Kallman, Howard Mumford Jones, Kenneth H. Jackson and Sean O’Faolain. The 12 Emily Dickinson poems are a small selection of her huge poetical outpouring, nearly all published posthumously.

Though the texts come from two very different sources, they share deeply personal common themes of religion, love, companionship, nature and approaches to death. The two 20th-Century American composers’ music spans the lyrical Romantic to near jazz in these two works we are truly excited to share with you.

Open recital.

Some useful notes on the Emily Dickinson poems: http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/1_Tickets_and_Events/Program_Notes/031110_ProgramNotes_Copland_Emily.pdf