McElroy: Tongues of Fire

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the label 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 “about death, exploring as they do our schizophrenic feelings of terror and awe towards the subject”. The much-lauded American poet W.S. Merwin provides the source for ‘After the Voices’, six songs with an “undercurrent of displacement, nostalgia, and identity” that gloss the poet’s conviction that “poetry is about what cannot be said”. Setting fiv