THE Swindon Recital Series welcomes the New Year with a programme of songs by Berlioz and Mahler connected by their themes of love and loss, performed by Swindon’s own Paul Turner and Polly Leech.  Dramatic and moving by turns, the songs celebrate the longing for love, the joy of love found and the despair of love lost.
Hector Berlioz loved Shakespeare and gave a nod to A Midsummer Night’s Dream by entitling a selection of songs Les nuits d’été (Summer Nights).
Completed in 1841 the songs are settings of six poems by Theophile Gautier and are connected by their subject matter and by their musical atmosphere. Berlioz worked on these  shortly before he separated from his wife and they may suggest unrest in his marriage. These were the only songs that Berlioz published as a group and represented a new form, the orchestral song cycle, which Mahler adopted half a century later.
Gustav Mahler’s songs are based on poems by Friedrich Rückert, a lyric poet he admired. Most were written in 1901 in an idyllic lakeside setting at a summer villa in Carinthia and reflect the Romantic theme of withdrawal into a secluded world of love, art and nature.

Where: Wyvern Theatre, Swindon
When: Wednesday, January 14, 1.05pm
Tickets: £5 or £8.50 with tea and cake
beforehand