Britten:
Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op. 22
Browne:
To Gratiana dancing and singing
Gipps:
Four Songs of Youth
Thomas:
Swan
Tippett:
Songs for Achilles

In Jeremy Sams’ new English - language singing version of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the passionate sentiments are liberated from the safe historical distance of the Italian Renaissance and unveiled in a way that was not possible in 1940, when Britten wrote t he cycle – his first for his partner Peter Pears. Tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas presents it alongside Michael Tippett’s equally ardent Songs for Achilles and a short item by W. Denis Browne, a close friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, as well as premiere recording s of four Brooke settings by Ruth Gipps and a new song - cycle by Thomas himself, to poems by Andrew McMillan. Tackling themes of love, shame, acceptance, war and death, the programme traverses a history of male homosexuality from necessary discretion to the (relatively) liberated present.