Three Love Songs
scored for soprano and piano
duration 12 minutes
Three Love Songs draws on the playful, lightly mischievous love poetry of Ron Padgett and approaches love as something both intimate and sensual. No lofty pathos, but everyday love, in which vulnerability and desire go hand in hand.
A warm night, cooking together, irresistibly sexy dancing through the house while the neighbors sleep: that is the premise of Love Cook. It is a song that whispers: come closer, let yourself go. Pumpkin is playful and shamelessly honest. Beneath the humor and gentle irony lie devotion and deep affection. In Love Poem, eroticism becomes more subtle, almost shimmering. Love ignites in small details, in touches and glances, in a tension that slowly flares up and continues to glow.
Together, these three songs form a light-footed yet sensual portrait of love as play, as seduction, and as surrender.
Love Cook
Pumkin
Love Poem
Three Love Songs is dedicated to Laurie Janssens and was first performed on June 28, 2018 at deSingel, Antwerp (Belgium).
Klassiek Centraal: That concert with those songs and also a composition for piano and violin as a gift for the first child of the artist couple Jolente De Maeyer and Nikolaas Kende who also performed the work – what an almost frightening thing that reflects the first impressions of what a baby' endured at birth – was of an absolute top level.
I write world class very deliberately. Coppens writes with a strong emotion, which he sets in all forms and tonally quite comprehensible and comprehensible. That is an example of how contemporary art can and may be. In fact, Coppens may well be doing what Mozart did: giving musical expression to all the emotions, feelings, influences and whatever else a person is continuously subjected to. Few are given to do it this way and those who can have something of genius and if so, then Matthias Coppens and Mozart find each other again. And just like Mozart, Coppens managed to attract the ideal singer to give his work, in this case that wonderful song cycle, its world premiere.