Hans Werner Henze says that he doesn’t accept commissions any more, but he was clearly eager to break his rule in this case: he was so impressed by Bostridge’s voice and artistry that the music of this new cycle was ‘more or less all written down in my head’ before he had decided on which texts to use. With the exception of the sixth song (by Hafiz, translated by Ruckert) and four quoted lines from Goethe in the first, the poems are Henze’s own and, he insists, drawn from real life.
Henze has been visiting the East coast of Africa for several years and the bold sailor Selim and the tragically abandoned Fatuma are both people that he knows. The cycle certainly has the quality of personal experience: in the third, ‘A Daybreak’, the sense of patient waiting in velvet darkness for the first signs of dawn is tangible; in the elegantly sinister second, ‘The Praying Mantis’, you are quite sure that Henze has watched her horrible courtship intently. They are very big songs (about eight minutes each, on average), strongly dramatic and very beautiful, especially the fourth (‘Caesarion’, which by analogy with Britten one might call Henze’s ‘Being Beauteous’) and the last (‘Paradise’, an eloquently lyrical love song, perhaps addressed to the moon). They are extremely but not impossibly demanding: ‘not impossibly’ because although they stretch Bostridge they do so with an absolute understanding of his strengths and qualities: I have not often heard him make such exquisite sounds as he does in that last song. The keyboard writing, too, makes virtuosic demands at times, and Drake is as equal to them as to the cycle’s tropical colours and bold imagery; fittingly, the cycle is dedicated to him as well as to Bostridge.
It was hearing Bostridge sing the Auden songs that drew Henze’s attention to him; it might well have been their delicacy and their precise response to Auden’s words and verse-structures that gave Bostridge the courage to commit himself to seven consecutive performances (and this recording) of what must be the most taxing work in his recital repertory. Splendidly recorded, it is an oustanding achievement by all three collaborators.'