Trois Chansons de la Renaissance

SKU: FP.FMJ02

ISBN 9790570503896.

A wonderfully balanced and yet contrasting set of songs for baritone voice and piano, inspired by Sir John Manduell’s long-standing love of French renaissance verse.

In the first, perhaps the most often quoted of Ronsard's poems, the poet invites young Mignonne to come and look at the purple rose and to realise that her beauty like the rose's will fade all too soon. Du Bellary's poem is redolent of late summer heat and haze as the thresher of the title calmly pursues his work. The Marot is a brief exercise in courteous mockery as the poet chides his ailing lady upon her gastronomic self-indulgence and warns her of the inevitable consequences upon her figure.

Finally published in 2013, Trois Chansons is one of the of the composer’s earliest surviving works, written while he was studying with the late Sir Lennox Berkely as a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music. The first performance was given by Beverley Humphreys at the Royal Academy of Music in 1956.