The internationally acclaimed baritone Dimitris Platanias and Sofia Tamvakopoulou on piano present a programme that highlights the relationship between two English composers and poetry, fiction and theatre. Ralph Vaughan Williams, founder of the national English school dominated, alongside Edward Elgar, in the first half of the 20th century. In 1904 he set poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to music in a single cycle of nine songs, telling the impressions of a traveller’s wanders away from civilisation and people as a story with a beginning and an end. This is followed by the cycle The House of Life on sonnets by the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Williams’ music is inspired by light at different times of the day and celebrates an ecstatic setting that celebrates mutual love. Gerald Finzi signs a cycle of five songs based on Shakespeare’s plays. The composer dedicates his songs, sometimes melancholy elegies and sometimes erotic ballads, to Vaughan Williams as a gift for his seventieth birthday.
