I will be premiering Phillip Cooke’s Lakesongs on August 9th 2011 in a recital of music for mezzo-soprano, viola and piano at the Lake District Summer Music Festival. The three songs were commissioned by the LDSM and are settings of A Lake Memory by William Wilfred Campbell, The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats and By The Lake, by Dame Edith Sitwell. The songs are intense and lyrical, charting a descent into emotional austerity. The composer describes the viola’s role in the songs as that of a “commentator, a distant representation of the emotional content an dark melancholy of the lakes”. The songs are extremely atmospheric and effective, and I hope there’ll be opportunities to perform them again.