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Article: Shining images score sound tribute

  • Peter Craven — © John Fairfax Holdings Limited
  • Source: The Age, 28 July 2007
  • Only 10% of this article's text is displayed below for reference purposes.
    Please contact the copyright holder/source publication to obtain the full article.

Melbourne composer David Chisholm has written a song cycle for the "spare grandeur" and symbolic landscapes of Yves Bonnefoy's famous poems about snow, writes Peter Craven.

MELBOURNE IS ABOUT to hear the first performances of a new song cycle written by the Melbourne composer David Chisholm and sung by Miriam Gordon-Stewart. The work is called The Beginning and the End of Snow and it sets to music the words of a famous sequence of poems, Debut et fin de la neige, by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, who is a poet of such high reputation that if he were to win the Nobel prize he would bring more honour to the award than it would bring to him.

Bonnefoy is the kind of poet who, like Wallace Stevens (or T. S. Eliot) seems to create symbolic landscapes in which the contemplation of the world and the way its image shines in the mind become inseparable aspects of each other. It's a poetry disclosing worlds of suggested emotion but doing so through evocations of a world stripped bare of verbal decoration.

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