Book of Flames and Shadows is a continuous sequence of music lasting about an hour, incorporating two pieces by James Weeks (*1978) and madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt (1507-68). Its theme is the awakening, of the sensual and erotic power of the spoken word, and its transformation into song, through the love poetry of Petrarch (1304-74) and his later imitators, including Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). A music of beginnings, of brief glances and tentative flowerings, planted in Italian Renaissance soil: looking back to the reticent, emerging expressivity of the earliest madrigals; to the attuning of lyric poetry to vocal sound in Petrarch; and to the way these new-old powers enable the artist to trace with more electric precision the contours of desire.
