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Programme Note

‘The Heartland Festival, for whom this work was commissioned,
had for years been home to a thriving Shakespearean festival. So
when they asked Tony Silvestri and me to write an original work
for them, we immediately decided that the poem should be a
traditional fourteen line sonnet. I told Tony that I would like to
end the work with the phrase “Long live fair Oriana,” an homage
to the Renaissance works written in tribute to the ‘Virgin Queen,’
Elizabeth I. Not only did Tony include the line at the end of his
brilliant sonnet, he made the poem an acrostic: the first letter of
each line spells out “HAIL FAIR ORIANA.”
Eric Whitacre