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?SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the tag debut of pianist- composer Eric McElroy with Tongues of Fire, a collection of 21 songs, all in premiere recordings, performed with acclaimed tenor James Gilchrist. American-born, Oxford, England-based, McElroy has composed extensively for piano, voice, choir, orchestra and various chamber ensembles, and has a growing reputation for his song settings of contemporary poets. Tongues of Fire features four song-cycles and a single song by living and 20th-century poets. Six of Robert Graves' early war poems form 'A Dead Man's Embers'. As McElroy comments in his erudite booklet notes, the songs are Inchabout death, exploring as they do our schizophrenic feelings of terror and awe towards the subjectInch. The much-lauded American poet W.S. Merwin provides the source for 'After the Voices', six songs with an Inchundercurrent of displacement, nostalgia, and identityInch that gloss the poet's conviction that Inchpoetry is about what cannot be saidInch. Setting five poems by Gregory Leadbetter, The Fetch, says McElroy, is Incha song-cycle about the uncanny... a confrontation between experience and languageInch. The disc's title, Tongues of Fire, is taken from three settings by Grevel Lindop, whose work McElroy asserts, Inchexemplifies the Erotic Sublime [and] conveys truths about love and desire that are, in the profoundest sense, universalInch. Completing the disc is Alice Oswald's A Short Story of Falling, which Inchexpresses in couplets the enormous range of water's manifestations and powers... evoking both the grace and wild force of waterscapes that exist above, below, around, and within ourselves... a poem that is full of joyInch. James Gilchrist's previous SOMM recordings include three admired volumes of One Hundred Years of British Song (SOMMCD 0621; 0636; 0646), two volumes of Parry's English Lyrics (SOMMCD 257; 270), and
