Composer: Eric McElroy
Performer: James Gilchrist, Eric McElroy
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Somm
Catalogue: SOMMCD0665
Release: 2023
Size: 244 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
Poems of Gregory Leadbetter
01. I. Misterioso
02. II. Stalking
03. III. Statuary I
04. IV. Statuary Ii
05. V. This
06. A Short Story of Falling: A Poem of Alice Oswald
After the Voices: Five Poems of W.S. Merwin
07. I. On a Distant Shore
08. II. The Laughing Thrush
09. III. The Morning
10. IV. The Nomad Flute
11. V. After the Voices
Tongues of Fire: Three Poems of Grevel Lindop
12. I. Watching
13. II. Mirror and Candle
14. III. Myth
A Dead Man’s Embers: Six Poems of Robert Graves
15. I. Two Fusiliers
16. II. Here They Lie
17. III. A Dead Boche
18. IV. Haunted
19. V. I’d Love to Be a Fairy’s Child
20. VI. Strong Beer
SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the label debut of pianistcomposer Eric McElroy with Tongues of Fire, a collection of 21 songs, all in premiere recordings, performed with acclaimed tenor James Gilchrist. American-born, Oxford, England-based, McElroy has composed extensively for piano, voice, choir, orchestra and various chamber ensembles, and has a growing reputation for his song settings of contemporary poets. Tongues of Fire features four song-cycles and a single song by living and 20th-century poets. Six of Robert Graves’ early war poems form ‘A Dead Man’s Embers’. As McElroy comments in his erudite booklet notes, the songs are “about death, exploring as they do our schizophrenic feelings of terror and awe towards the subject”. The much-lauded American poet W.S. Merwin provides the source for ‘After the Voices’, six songs with an “undercurrent of displacement, nostalgia, and identity” that gloss the poet’s conviction that “poetry is about what cannot be said”. Setting five poems by Gregory Leadbetter, The Fetch, says McElroy, is “a song-cycle about the uncanny… a confrontation between experience and language”. The disc’s title, Tongues of Fire, is taken from three settings by Greve Lindop, whose work McElroy asserts, “exemplifies the Erotic Sublime [and] conveys truths about love and desire that are, in the profoundest sense, universal”. Completing the disc is Alice Oswald’s A Short Story of Falling, which “expresses in couplets the enormous range of water’s manifestations and powers… evoking both the grace and wild force of waterscapes that exist above, below, around, and within ourselves.… a poem that is full of joy”.