Inspired by the idea that music could be haunted by a speaking voice, Matthew Pollard and Peter Kenny's first collaboration This concert will fall in love with you was composed with unprecedented speed and intensity. Peter's first draught of the monodrama sequence arrived, Gothically enough, during the night of a full moon. It was only on meeting Matthew, however, did the strangely heartbroken persona Peter had created begin to find its true context. After much collaborative discussion, the newly-revised monologues provided the basis for Matthew's spellbinding composition; the most recent addition to a small category of works combining spoken word with an instrumental ensemble. Mindful of the Sitwell-Walton Façade (1951) Matthew decided to directly relate the music to the texts, illustrating the monologues with rhythms and cadences derived from the impassioned tone of the words. Matthew accommodated Peter's voice either freely or within repeating 'episodes' of a few bars each. Matthew’s unorthodox choice of instruments (piano, violin, marimba, vibraphone, speaking voice and mixed choir) allowed him to create a vivid variety of tone and texture with an orchestral range of pitch. Musically, the work divides the twelve monologues into three sections. The first and third sections use the theme in its original, tonally consonant form. The middle section (Variations three to eight) employs an inverted version of the theme, releasing stranger, more dissonant harmonies and reflecting the slightly unhinged abstraction of the words at this point. Clameur (meaning a cry or a plea) is a setting for mixed choir and marimba of a poem from Peter's collection 'The boy who fell upwards'. If This concert will fall in love with you contains a voice somehow trapped inside a concert, Clameur continues the theme of confinement: ‘I came to in a coffin/in London's riddled clay/crushed in a tube train/stuck in a tunnel’. The piece fell naturally into two parts. Part one opens with a vocalisation depicting the violent clamour of an Underground journey, with ostinatos driving the piece relentlessly through the labyrinth of the London Tube. This gradually unwinds into the second movement, where the tone is one of ecstatic nostalgia, reflecting the poem's escapist and homesick longing for Guernsey's granite cliffs. In Guernsey there is an ancient legal practice called Clameur de Haro. When a Clameur is raised (by declaiming the Lord's Prayer in French) all protagonists in a dispute must stop and take the matter to a higher authority. The Minotaur is the ultimate victim of confinement. This short poem is in the tradition of dramatic monologue going back to Robert Browning (via Modernists such as T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound) and hovers between tragedy and comedy. For, almost wilfully, the Minotaur does not understand his own nature or that of the labyrinth in which he has been confined. Matthew completed the music for Minotaur on the morning of the recording and this is the first—and only—take. The right hand of Glen Capra's piano part describes a jittery, anxious surface, while the left hints at dark, subconscious motives. Together they create Minotaur’s self-deceiving maze. Our sincere thanks to the choir: Jane Farrell, Tim Gillett, Tanya Izzard, Ric Morris, Anna Orchard, Basil Richmond, Tim Rose, Erika Schilsky, Gill Stephenson and Richard Wilson. Also to Simon Scardanelli location recording, sound engineering and mastering; Adrian Turner artist photos; and Phillip Adams of St Michael & All Angels Church, Brighton, where these recordings were made and ‘This concert will fall in love with you’ was given its world premiere in 2010.