Love - Sacred & Profane

In this recital, tenor Guy Cutting explores the many facets of love, from budding desire to existential doubt and quiet contemplation. The program offers a cross-section of twentieth-century English song, where intimacy and poetic refinement go hand in hand.

In the music of Gerald Finzi, love takes on a fragile, almost pastoral hue: tender, at times playful, yet suffused with melancholy and longing. Peter Warlock turns his gaze toward connections with landscape and identity, while Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten explore the boundaries between the earthly and the spiritual. At the center stands Britten’s Canticle I, in which human and divine love merge. The result is a richly layered musical journey in which love appears in all its intensity—as a source of solace, wonder, and loss.