Program notes:

Having just worked with Sandy's poetry in the oratorio "A Celebration of Trees" late in 2022, I was eager to try my hand at it again. We had a brief talk after a lecture he held in the Queen Silvia Hall on his new poetry collection “In a Time of Distance”, after which he was kind enough to send me a copy of the book and place a commission from me to set whichever poems I liked to music.

For this piece, I selected four that really spoke to me, on the subject of love and longing; a tired subject perhaps, but I felt that Sandy's work had something important to say that I was excited to say myself, in music.

I have chosen to call this piece a "Chamber Cantata", rather than the perhaps more readily available moniker "Song-Cycle". It should be said that I do not mean "Cantata" in the way that one might normally think of the word, in the context of Bach or Mozart, but rather as it was employed by the likes of Poulenc; it has no overtly Christian or spiritual meaning or intention; think of "Cantata" from the root "Cantare", "to sing"; it is simply a sung celebration of love, for which I think the somewhat grander nature of "Cantata" seems more fitting than "Song-Cycle".