Two Baudelaire-related performances in 3 days. On June 10 Claire Booth gave the first performance of A Land of Rain with the BCMG and Oliver Knussen. This is my setting of Nicholas Moore’s translations of Baudelaire, 31 versions of the same Spleen poem, 10 of which I used for this song cycle. And on the 12th Andrew Watts and Iain Burnside gave a remarkable performance in Aldeburgh Church of an earlier song cycle, Un colloque sentimental, whose two Baudelaire settings were composed in 1971 – more or less my earliest surviving pieces. A great treat to have two such wonderful singers : Andrew and Iain will be recording ‘A Counter Tenor’s Songbook’ for NMC in September; while later in the same week Claire gave a tour de force of a performance of Poulenc’s La voix humaine in the drawing room of Snape Bridge House – virtually impossible to describe the intensity of this staging – you had to be there.
