Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The Cheah Chin Duo presented a concert of love songs yesterday afternoon at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields. Trudy Chan and Conrad Chu were on the piano, with soprano Kathleen Cantrell, mezzo-soprano Catherine Hedberg, tenor Dennis Tobenski and bass Phillip Cheah. They presented Brahms's Liebeslieder , Op. 52, and Neue Liebeslieder , Op. 65, and John Corigliano's Gazebo Dances (1972) (Waltz and Tarantella) and Liebeslied (1996). Also influenced by Brahms was the middle set of art songs by American pianist and composer Stephen Hough. Other Love Songs (2010) set to music poems and texts by Claude McKay, Julian of Norwich, Langston Hughes, Laurence Hope, A. E. Housman and the Gospel of John. I especially liked the musical setting of Housman's poignant poem "Because I liked you better." Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away. To put the world between us We parted, stiff and dry; ...

from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's TLS review of The Letters of A. E. Housman edited by Archie Burnett: Only once does the mask slip, in the sole surviving letter to Moses Jackson, the Oxford contemporary to whom Housman devoted himself, but from whom, in Laurence Housman's carefully chosen words, "there was no response in kind". Forty years on, with Jackson dying of stomach cancer, A. E. Housman sent him a copy of Last Poems with what came as close as he ever dared to writing a love letter, just as his nickname for Moses, "Mo", stopped tantalizingly short of being a confession of love, "Amo". It is now 11 o'clock in the morning, and I hear that the Cambridge shops are sold out. Please to realise therefore, with fear and respect, that I am an eminent bloke; though I would rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots. The desperate blokeishness of this suggests how raw Housman's wounds still were, but the little dabs of all...