Love Blooms | Chamber Choir Ireland and Ellie Slorach

Love Blooms opens with Derri Joseph Lewis' Something Exciting, an explosion of elation and nervousness, the feelings Lewis experiences when he first came out to his dad by text message in 2017:

…I have something exciting to tell you.
I didn’t know how to say it, but thought I should say…

In Soneto XVII, Shruthi Rajasekar sets the seventeenth sonnet of Pablo Neruda's Cien Sonetos de Amor, about an intimate love that transforms two individuals into one existence.

Gerald Finzi's Seven poems of Robert Bridges is a set of vivid partsongs which evoke joyful, fleeting, pure, passionate, and excruciating love through floral imagery—from a single blossom appearing in winter, to the intensity of a flower in bloom, and its fading beauty once plucked.

Alex Groves’ Stream and Pool sets a text by ‘Michael Field’, the pseudonym under which Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, romantic and artistic partners, wrote poetry. Groves uses images of water, tides, and waves to reflect the turbulence and powerful unseen forces that act on us in our relationships.

Commissioned by Chamber Choir Ireland and New Music Dublin in 2023, Áine Mallon's Beloved is a beautiful setting of the second canticle of the Song of Songs, a playful yet passionate love poem weaving the narrative of two lovers.

Nathan James Dearden's full of sweet days is a setting of a poem by George Herbert, about the fleeting nature of things—beautiful days which must fall to night, a sweet rose whose root is 'ever in its grave', spring flowers—all things must die, except for a sweet and virtuous soul.

Benjamin Britten's Five Flower Songs range from musings on the passage of time in 'To Daffodils', to a depiction of the hermit-like evening primrose opening at night. The collection was composed to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of botanists Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, and their shared fondness of flowers.

Programme

Something Exciting—Derri Joseph Lewis (Wales, b. 1997)

Soneto XVII—Shruthi Rajasekar (USA, b. 1996)

Seven poems of Robert Bridges—Gerald Finzi (England, 1901-1956)

Stream and Pool—Alex Groves (UK)

Beloved—Áine Mallon (Ireland, b. 1994)

full of sweet days—Nathan James Dearden (Wales, b. 1992)

Five Flower Songs—Benjamin Britten (England, 1913-1976)

This programme is c. 1 hour in duration.

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Host or Publisher Chamber Choir Ireland