Lakesongs (2011)
1. A Lake Memory
2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
3. By the Lake
Mezzo-soprano, viola & piano (or Baritone, cello & piano)
Commissioned by the Lake District Summer Music Festival, with generous support from the Granada Foundation for the 2011 festival
Duration:
12′
First Performance:
9 August 2011
Clare McCaldin, Yuko Inoue, Tadashi Imai, Ambleside Parish Centre, Ambleside, Cumbria, UK as part of the Lake District Summer Music Festival 2011
22 March 2012 (baritone version)
Jeremy Huw Williams, Christopher Allan, Nigel Foster, St Mary de Lode, Gloucester, UK
Scottish premiere:
3 November 2018
Jillian Bain Christe, Scott Dickinson, Catherine Herriott, St Andrew’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, UK
US premiere:
22 September 2019
Ellen Scholl, Matthew McBride-Daline, Kevin Bylsma, Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA
Score
Programme note
Lakesongs is a setting of three poems, rather unsurprisingly with lakes as a somewhat oblique subject matter. I was commissioned to write a companion piece to the Brahms Two Songs for alto, viola and piano and to draw upon the vast literary heritage of the Lake Poets as my inspiration – unfortunately I didn’t gel with the Romantic poets and needed to look a little further afield for my texts. The idea of setting poems with lakes as the theme came to me after listening to Elgar’s Sea Pictures and gave me the opportunity to set diverse poets all with the same general theme.
I say that lakes are an oblique subject matter as none of the three poems goes to great lengths to describe the lake in question; rather there is an omnipresence of a lake in all of the poems with a constant, unfaltering, monotonous presence. William Wilfred Campbell’s A Lake Memory has a lake ‘throbbing in with voice of pain’ whereas Yeats has ‘lake water lapping with low sounds’ – this is a depiction of nature at its most sublime – a terror when faced with the unremitting force of nature. Edith Sitwell’s By The Lake goes further and doesn’t mention a lake but suggests a frozen wilderness, it is precisely that the lake is ‘not’ present that emphasises the emotional bleakness of the poem.
Lakesongs is very different in character to the Brahms songs and charts a descent into austerity from the warm tones of the opening A Major ostinato of A Lake Memory through the sparseness of The Lake Isle of Innisfree to the wintery tone of By The Lake. The inclusion of the viola with its very natural, almost human voice and tone adds an extra subtext to the work and the poems – it often has the role of a commentator, a distant representation of the emotional content and dark melancholy of the lakes mentioned.
Lakesongs is dedicated to Andrew Lucas, Renna Kellaway and the Lake District Summer Music Festival for all the help and input they have given me in my career so far, and to many more exciting future collaborations.
PAC
Recording
Lakesongs (2011) by Phillip Cooke, performed by Clare McCaldin (soprano), Yuko Inoue (viola) and Tadashi Imai (piano) at Ambleside Parish Church, UK.
