‘Forget This Night’ explores impermanence and desire through songs by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz.

The heart of the programme is Clairières dans le ciel, Lili Boulanger’s only song cycle and an overlooked masterpiece of the genre, which maps the interior emotional landscape of someone deeply in love – from blissful awe to the devastation of abandonment.

The cycle is framed by songs of Szymanowski (a contemporary of Boulanger, who across the continent and against the backdrop of the First World War was also writing music of simmering passion) and Bacewicz, of a generation later, who treats the same themes in songs of fresh directness and aching lyricism.

Opening with Boulanger’s first extant song, ‘Attente’, and ending with the premiere recording of a fragment for solo voice she wrote at the very end of her life, ‘Forget This Night’ poses a universal human question: how wholeheartedly can we open ourselves to relationships, and moments, that will inevitably end?