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Programme Note

Winter Afternoons takes three of the American poetess' 1,775 poems and sets them in a continuous movement with some solo interludes for the double bass. Peter Dickinson has used American poets in other vocal works: an e.e. cummings song cycle (Purcell Room, March 22nd, in a programme with other settings of this poet); Extravaganzas, to texts of Gregory Corso (to be broadcast in 1971 along with three motets sung by the King's Singers). Emily Dickinson's poems treat death entirely without morbidity in finely polished stanzas with a metre derived from hymns.

© Peter Dickinson