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About this Event
This provocative song-recital probes themes of the uncanny in a programme merging the traditional with the contemporary. At its core is the premiere of a song-cycle by American pianist-composer Eric McElroy (Merton College, Oxford) based on poems by Gregory Leadbetter (Birmingham City University) that examines music’s ability to reawaken the mystical in the ordinary – to unleash what Leadbetter calls ‘a sense between the skin and something understood’. This cycle is paired with songs by John Ireland and Ian Venables, as well as McElroy’s cycle of poems by Robert Graves, A Dead Man’s Embers, which was hailed by Musical Opinion as “a masterpiece by a young composer of whom much can be expected.” A pre-concert talk at 7.15pm considers the collaboration between poet and composer and the effect of song-setting on our understanding of poetry.
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*Featuring poems from Gregory Leadbetter's The Fetch by permission of Nine Arches Press