English Touring Opera – Lyric Solitude 3. Tippett’s Boyhood’s End and The Heart’s Assurance/Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne

The drama of living in a state of war runs through this programme, featuring responses in movement made to the music and poetry. Thomas Elwin (tenor) is the soloist in the ecstatic Boyhood’s End (1943), to which Paul Chantry and Rae Piper make response in dance. Elwin is also the soloist in The Heart’s Assurance – the most remarkable and fearless setting of poetry by young men who fought and died in WW2. These poems, thrusting sensual desire into a landscape of death, finds response in movement by Bernadette Iglich. Iglich also sets Britten’s eloquent, searing response to what he saw at the concentration camp at Belsen at the end of the war in The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Donne’s sonnets ravish and twist, and call out for love and understanding. They are sung by tenor Richard Dowling.