Not a bouquet or a vase,

we give to you a concert of Flowers.

It promises an eclectic selection
plucked from worlds whose
variety is rivalled only by natures
multitude and abundance.
Listen to the blood on thorns,
the svelte of petals, digging
deep into you like roots.
Step into our garden of musical delights
and dont forget to stop and hear the roses.
A concert by any other
would surely smell less sweet.
Eric Whitacres Three Flower Songs sets music to three different flower poems
unified by their presentation of the flower as an ambivalent symbol. In Emily Dickinsons
poem I Hide Myself, the flower is at once, the refuge and prison of the poems shy persona.
The cycles second piece takes its text from a poem by Federica Lorca. With a Lily in Your
Hand juxtaposes contrasting moods by playing the lilys cool tenderness against its vibrant
ferocity to spectacular effect. Whitacre ends the cycle with Edmund Wallers Go Lovely Rose
which encapsulates the impermanence of love and life, and the emotional peaks and trough
that life entails.
From the corner of your eyes, you spy a lonesome path that draws you in which you
follow only to find yourself lost in a burgeoning hedge maze of lilies from Renaissance
settings of the Songs of Solomon. Four specimens bloom spectacularly: a pair of Ego Glos

Campi by Jacobus Clemens Non Papa and Francisco Guerrero alongside a couple of Sicut
Lilium by Antoine Brumel and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Both texts feature the lily
as a nurturing and rejuvenating symbol of purity. These qualities then point to the lily as a
metaphor for the Virgin Mary. Marek Raczyskis contemporary setting of Sicut Lilium
leads you out of the Renaissance and back to the Twenty First century. The piece begins with
a nod to the past via a chant-like opening, though this eventually makes way for Raczynskis
moving and sensual sensual treatment of the text, reminding the audience of the lilys
association with physical pleasures.
Similarly, selections from Morton Lauridsens Les chansons des roses, depicts an
experience of love that begins in the realm of the physical and the sensual but grows and
blooms to reach an emotional, and almost spiritual, climax. In La Rose Complete, the speaker
equates the rose to life itself, describing his desire for the rose as being as pressing as the
need to breathe. Longing and desire then gives way to fulfilment in Dirait On in which even
the most legendary of pining lovers, Narcissus, is finally romantically fulfilled.
Fulfilment and despair, love and loss, are themes also explored by William Hawley in
Chansons de Ronsard. The pieces, which take their texts from the Renaissance poet Pierre de
Ronsard, often feature flowers as a reminder of life and loves inevitable decay. In Sur La
Mort de Marie, the speaker accepts that the rose must die petal by petal unfolding while
acknowledging the roses ability to reassure and comfort. In Bel Aubepin, love is likened to a
resolute Hawthorne flower that resists death and decay while in Ode a Cassandre, the speaker
urges his lover to live without reservations in the face of that same entropy.
As we near the end of our nursery of harmonies, selections from Paul Mealors Four
Madrigals on Rose Texts revisit the rootedness of flowers in both the secular and religious
imagination. Upon a bank with roses set about weaves an aural tapestry of lovers luxuriating

in the midst of nature who are poised to fall in love. Contrastingly, A Spotless Rose returns to
the religious connotations of the rose pointing to the sacrifice symbolised in the red of its
petals and the promise of everlasting life with its associations with spring.
The concert ends with Eriks Esenvalds Ziedu Vasaru a paean to the selfless
generosity of Nature that asks nothing from man but continues to fulfil the unbroken promise

of Summers Full of Flowers.