Homage to authors

+ Peter WARLOCK (1894-1930): The Curlew for tenor voice, flute, cor anglais and string quartet (1922) – words by Yeats

+ Elliott CARTER (b 1908): Con leggerezza pensosa – Omaggio a Italo Calvino (With thoughtful levity – Homage to Italo Calvino) for clarinet, violin and cello (1991) – 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth

+ Elliott CARTER (b 1908): Canon for 4, Homage to William [Glock] for flute, bass clarinet, violin and cello (1984) – 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth

+ Leoš JANÁČEK (1854-1928): String Quartet No 1 (The Kreutzer Sonata) – after Tolstoy (1923)

Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937): Piano Trio in A minor (1914)

Composers regularly pay homage to authors in song settings and other genres in which words prompt vocal setting. We begin with a song cycle with collaboration from instrumental chamber forces (flute, cor anglais and string quartet) by Peter Warlock, a composer exceptionally sensitive to verbal shape and rhythm, which both sets and pays homage to verse by the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats. The other three homages of this program are all instrumental. The doyen of American composers, Elliott Carter, who is due to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2008, pays concise and intricate tributes to the celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino and to the British musical administrator and writer on music, Sir William Glock, whose regime at the BBC helped inaugurate a new era for contemporary music. Janáček’s characteristically vivid and emotionally charged string quartet The Kreutzer Sonata is inspired by a passionate tale told by one of the greatest of European novelists, Tolstoy, in a novella that in turn draws its title from a famous violin-piano sonata by Beethoven. Only Ravel in this program offers in his superbly fashioned and melodically haunting A minor Piano Trio a piece of music entirely independent of the homage due to literary authors. Although Ravel draws on a Malayan verse-song form, the pantoum, for one of his structural devices, this piece exists without specific authorial tribute, reminding us how eloquently music can sing and dance in homage to nothing but itself.