An evening comprising a newly composed modern classical song cycle by Rory Boyle which sets to music poems musing on themes of motherhood from Dilys Rose. But first, a bit of Janacek. "Intimate Letters" was Leos Janacek's second string quartet, written by the composer in 1928 in response to an aching correspondence he undertook across many years with Kamila Stosslova.
These four pieces certainly swell with romantic yearning, the opening movement punctuated by turbulent, volatile eruptions interspersed with more pastoral moments of quiet contemplation. The second movement takes a sweetly airy melody and marries it to a skewed waltz pattern, while later in the fourth part scraped shards of near dissonant disruptive noise predominate. If this is love which Janacek was undoubtedly attempting to communicate, then it exists in both its most heavenly and hellish forms.
The main performance this evening by Red Note Ensemble is "Watching Over You", a sequence of seven songs focused on the equally turbulent emotions which predominate throughout early motherhood. Dilys Rose's poems such as "Pools of Wonder", "Baby Blues" and "The Night-Light's Halo" merge the wishful hoping for perfection and instantaneous meaning to be found when everyday existence is no longer one's own due to a tiny new life cradled in your arms and juxtaposes that with the fear and the terror of bringing such a vulnerable infant state into a potentially dangerous world filled to the brim with "...babysnatchers and bogeymen".
The music is at times hypnotically transfixing, particularly the opening "Intimation' with its sparse globules of sound over which Karen Cargill hymns of a sudden awareness of deep, irreversible change within oneself. "Watching Over You" is a brave attempt at communicating the complex emotions felt by half the world's population in what can seem a bewilderingly difficult procedure. That the procedure is pregnancy, then birth and the early attempts to communicate with this new central figure makes this song-cycle of universal significance. We've all had some part to play in this process.