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About the Score

Colin Eatock · In the Bleak Mid-Winter (1998)

The composer writes: I chose to set four of the five stanzas of Christina Rossetti’s famous text of 1872 to music for two reasons. First, I liked the poem. I was attracted to Rossetti’s profound metaphysical imagery, curiously and yet comfortably wedded to a kind of Pre-Raphaelite simplicity.

The second reason was because I had never heard any of the previous settings of this poem. I was aware that Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, Harold Darke and others had composed settings of the text, but it was only after I had written my own version that I listened to any of these works. I saw my ignorance as a virtue, as it meant that I would not be unduly influenced by those who had gone before me.

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