Two Songs – movement I & II

In Two Songs, Alexander Dmitriev sets two poems by Joseph Brodsky, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature. Brodsky, a native of Russia, became a U.S. citizen in 1977, and, though he wrote most of his poetry in Russian, wrote these two poems in English. Dmitriev sets the texts – which deal with love and loss – in a gently rolling, mostly homophonic style that captures the nuances of the text without obscuring the words themselves. His use of the Dies irae chant in Törnfallet underscores the preoccupation with death underlying Brodsky’s elegiac poems.