Canti Lunatici

Bernard Rands’s Canti Lunatici sets fifteen texts for soprano and orchestra about the moon. Rands has chosen and ordered his texts to suggest the waxing and waning of the moon’s phases and his intention with the cycle was to create a ‘labyrinth of relationships by the compositional arrangement of the resources of voice, text, instrument and musical idea’. The moon and its phases have for ages exerted a powerful force on life on Earth so it is no wonder that Rands’s remarkably dramatic musical evocation speaks to us with such great power and mystery. His brilliant command of musical resources, voice and text, is perhaps nowhere more evident in his body of work than here in the Canti Lunatici, which comprises one third of his monumental Canti Trilogy including Canti del Sole and Canti dell’Eclisse.