A Rapture Suite - a tone poem for Horn Trio - download

The horn trio A Rapture Suite was written in the summer of 2019; but it draws its name, and inspiration, from the Rapture Song Cycle for female voice and pianoforte published in 2016, which comprises settings of 20 of the 52 poems that make up Carol Ann Duffy's award-winning collection Rapture, winner of the 2005 T.S. Elliot Prize.

The settings I have used here for the Horn Trio are Forest, River, Rapture and part of Give from book one, and Grief and Art from part two. The trio was written for my two young grandchildren Emily and James and for friend and colleague Roy Wightman who knows the children well, having accompanied both of them for their diploma examinations.

The work is perhaps best considered as a short quasi tone poem, based as it is on the song cycle settings and immediately setting out to evoke the opening scene the poet so vividly portrays:

"There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping the last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in, under the sighing restless trees and my whole life vanished."

The second movement, River, is just violin and piano while movement four, Grief, is horn and piano, dedicated to the memory of Guy Woolfenden. The work uses the medium of twelve-tone music throughout, creating a very distinctive yet reasonably accessible sound world.