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Youth and Age (1998)

A song cycle for baritone & piano on poems by William Butler Yeats.

William Butler Yeats' poetry is based on Irish nationalism, Celtic myth, politics, love, mystic and ageing. It's the ageing aspect which runs through this cycle of 10 songs. The poems are::

  • -   All Things can Tempt me
  • -   To a Child dancing in the Wind
  • -   Two years Later
  • -   The Wild Swans at Coole
  • -   He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
  • -   The Second Coming
  • -   Youth and Age
  • -   Men improve with the Years
  • -   The Fisherman
  • -   The Circus Animals' Desertion (parts1&3)

Commissioned by the "Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst " and dedicated to baritone Maarten Koningsberger.

Première: 26 January, 2000 in ORPHEUS, Apeldoorn by Maarten Koningsberger en pianist Kelvin Grout.

duration approx.: 21 '

  Currently working on a work for      saxophone quartet, requested by      the Bron Saxophone Quartet.

  My latest work is "Ritual text      for the afterlife"  for women's          choir and tubular bells.
     Ancient Greek goldplates with      texts - recently  found in graves -      that were carried by the dead on      their journey to afterlife.

 In progress is a work of a much     bigger scale: Blodeuwedd,  a     dance poem for narrator,      singer/reciter, dancer and      ensemble. The poem is by the      Welsh poet Tony Conran.

  Another recent work (2016) is
     O me! O life! (Walt Whitman) for      choir and string quintet.

  My guitar sonata (1982) is      now being published by
     Editiones Eudora (Madrid),

  Draaf, Foekje. Draaf!

    Watch the television interview.     (You need to understand Frisian,     though).