Program notes from the composer:

It was the endearing performances that alto Judit Rijk gave as the soloist in my In Memoriam with the youth orchestra Il mosaico in Hungary in 2006 that encouraged me agree to compose a new work for her unusual ensemble of alto voice, violin and bassoon. My suspicion that there was more to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets after the Portuguese than her famous How do I love thee led me to investigate several other of these works. The three I chose for this short cycle are, of course, about love, but about more than that. The cycle itself I imagined as a set of movements which mean more when these movements are performed in the intended order. A careful listener may even observe how the musical language changes as the cycle draws to a close.