The Lost Generation

Tuesday, November 6, 2001, at 8PM
Trinity St. Paul's Centre

For Immediate Release - Toronto, October 10, 2001: Toronto's newest chamber music ensemble, Talisker Players, returns to Trinity-St. Paul's Centre to launch its second concert series on Tuesday, November 6 at 8PM. Texts selected from among the 63 poems of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad set to music (for strings and piano) by Butterworth, Vaughan William and Gurney will be performed by tenor Colin Ainsworth, baritone Michael Sproule and the Talisker Players and pianist Peter Longworth. They will be joined by actor/reader Deborah Tennant for an evening of music and poetry titled The Lost Generation.

Published in 1896, Housman's famous poems evoke a world that was to vanish in the horror of World War I; indeed in many of them there is an eerie sense of impending loss and a wistful longing for vanished happiness. The poems "combine deeply felt emotions with a classical elegance and simplicity of form and language. Next to Shakespeare and Robert Herrick they are one of the greatest gifts an English poet ever made to English composers." With their celebration of the English countryside and longing for a 'land of lost content'; their stoic endurance and the dramatic situations, these poems had immense appeal for the generation of artists that lived through the war and struggled to make sense of it. As George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ivor Gurney each chose 6 to 8 poems from the 63 to set in their cycles, The Lost Generation features different settings of some of the same poems, highlighting some very interesting contrasts and differences.

The music will be interspersed with readings from the wartime correspondence between Vera Brittain and the four young men -- her brother, her fiancé and two of their close friends – whose experiences in the war inspired her famous autobiography, Testament of Youth. These texts will be read by singer/actor Deborah Tennant, who is currently a member of the Stratford Festival Company. The Talisker Players have invited as guest artists tenor Colin Ainsworth and baritone Michael Sproule, two young singers whose artistry, musicianship and dramatic presence have already attracted considerable attention

Colin Ainsworth, tenor

Michael Sproule, baritone

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Media Contact: Francine Labelle/flINK
416-654-4406
labellefrancine@rogers.com

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