Judith Weir

A Spanish Liederbooklet is a short song cycle(of about eight minutes’ duration) for high soprano and piano written for Eileen Hulse in 1988. Eileen gave the first performance accompanied by Graham Johnson at the 1988 CheltenhamFestival. The texts are all Spanish Romances by anonymous authors from the 15th/16th centuries. The songs are sung in the original Spanish.

Broken Branches is a short 3 minute song/meditation for soprano piano and double bass. It was written for a concert in New York in 1993 which featured a whole programme of political songs; composers were left free tochoose their own subject matter. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia was then at one of its many furious peaks and Weir made a transcription from a recording of a sad choral song from Croatia called zaspo Janko podjablonem. Work for Soprano Piano and Double Bass.