Sarah Flower

Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are two new recordings that present compelling examples of Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter. Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard. Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper. Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'.