Duration: 8'
Year of composition: 2022 (Piano); 2025 (Dreams)
Premiere: March 14, 2025, Pyatt Hall Vancouver as part of Vancouver Pro Musica's Sonic Boom Festival, performed by soprano Robyn Driedger-Klassen and pianist Rosemary O'Connor.
The D.H.Lawrence Songs were composed in December 2022 and February 2025.
Dreams
All people dream, but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind,
Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity.
But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people,
For they dream their dreams with open eyes,
And make them come true
Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Texts D. H. LAWRENCE
