My thanks and appreciation to Matthew Stewart of Rogue Strands who has written an insightful post here about End of Season / Fine di stagione, focusing on tensions of various kinds running through the work. It’s exciting when a reader / reviewer homes in on something that really is part of the foundations of a work or project.

My thanks also to Alwyn Marriage who has reviewed End of Season / Fine di stagione for London Grip, here. When Alwyn mentions that ‘the limitations of the written word mean one cannot have access to the music’ – she’s referring to the song cycle that grew from the poems.

There’s a live recording of the first performance (which took place beside Lago Maggiore, last October) of Amy Crankshaw’s enchanting musical setting of six of the poems, and you can listen to it here, by kind permission of the composer. There will be other performances of the song cycle, in due course, and hopefully at some point there will also be a studio recording.

Thank you again, Matthew and Alwyn! Both these reviews came through by chance in a week that’s exactly one year on from a trip I made to Cannero with Amy (the composer of the song cycle) in March 2022. It felt like quite an adventure – lockdown in Italy was only just easing, we had to show our passes and wear masks everywhere, and there weren’t any tourists around. It was wonderful to spend a few days in that beautiful Lago Maggiore landscape – in the season of mimosa and camellias and the citrus festival, when the village was just waking up from its mild and quiet winter, and from the particular silence and isolation Covid had brought to this small community. What a perfect time to collaborate intensely on the shape and structure of the song cycle.

We walked the hills, thinking about the subject matter and mood of the poems, about which poems to include in the cycle, discussing what kind of voice might work best for the songs, which instruments to choose, how to represent elements of the land and place in the music with authenticity and integrity (this is a special area of focus in Amy’s work), and so much more. Amy made preliminary musical sketches shortly after we returned to the UK, and composed the song cycle over the spring and summer. The first performance was on October 6th 2022, in Cannero.

And thank you again also to Matthew Paul who reviewed End of Season / Fine di stagione here for Sphinx a few months ago.

Copies of End of Season / Fine di stagione are available from Frogmore Press, or send me an email at clarepbest@me.com and I’ll post you a copy for £12 (postage and packing included).