Songs and Haiku

Songs and Haiku is a previously unreleased collection of songs for mezzo-soprano and piano, published to mark what would have been Jonathan Harvey’s 80th birthday in 2019.

Two haiku (the first for piano alone – the only piece here to have been published before – the latter by Basho) bookend three love songs dedicated to Harvey’s wife Rosa. The grouping of the pieces into a 8-minute cycle was the composer’s own idea, and it mixes Eastern and Western poets in a totally characteristic manner. Both Tagore and E. E. Cummings are represented, poets who feature in some of Harvey’s finest works (Song Offerings and Forms of Emptiness, respectively), and a third song sets Tennyson’s ‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal’.