"An exhilarating mixture of anger and tenderness" ~ Annea Lockwood
Performed by mezzo Claire Scholes at Auckland Chamber Orchestra's Composer Portrait concert dedicated to the music of Annea Lockwood
Joy Harjo Photo: Shawn Miller, Library of Congress.
I Give You Back (1993) is a setting of a poem by Joy Harjo, the American poet of Cherokee and Muscogee Creek descent who is the current United States Poet Laureate.
Annea Lockwood says she found the poem an exhilarating mixture of anger and tenderness. She set it as a lament – one of the great traditional female vocal forms, she says, feeling it also as an exorcism and a liberation, transforming fear into freedom.
Recorded by RNZ in Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar School, Auckland, 11 August 2019
Producer and mixing engineer: Tim Dodd
Recording engineer: Rangi Powick
