Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

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Three songs for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra
With words by M. R. Peacocke
Score: issuu.com/scoresondemand/docs/the_dansant_47182
Audio: youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l-yWkAMmxN8xN_ZbliPrJ2065G_2tKRD0
Dame Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
John Wilson, conductor

0:00 I. Foxtrot
The briefest card my dear we are leaving.
Imagine the long curve of the Blue Train like the line of a mouth closed and smiling and Charles in the opposite window seat head thrown back the smoke from his cigarette coiling and coiling.
There is a fellow in the carriage with artificial legs and a scar on his face unspeakable.
My hem is in handkerchief points, my head is a gleaming oval on the fluid stem of my spine.
I shall turn my shoulders, the silhouette narrow and disengaged.
Imagine the endless fluted bias of the waves.
I shall show my creamy back.
Write to the Hôtel Blanc.
I am learning a modern geometry of desire.

2:14 II. Slow Foxtrot
Lacquer bows to bleu marine, fingered waved, who must respond as though she were not gratified.
Begin the formal promenade.
The sea is wrinkled like a skin and laps the darkly pitted sand.
A liner moving Tunis bound sets the powdered stars aside, jewelling the bay alone, and creeping on and creeping on, elegant à la mode, fades away from sight of land.
And don't you love the negro band? Don't you adore the saxophone?
Your nails are painted deep as blood.
Softly flexing in steps glide.
Attentive to the live-long end beneath the scalpel of the moon.

5:17 III. Tango
Let us invent marble and five o'clock.
I'll take white, you take black.
How engagingly we rhyme across the chequered level in the perfume of tea and petits fours.
I shall sample the tiniest slice of the Grand Succès on the lemon terrace, the newly apparent moon a delicacy cat-ice thin, fresh as mimosa.

Your legs are dangerously long under the palm trees at Menton, my thighs all silk and hesitation drawing the tango down the polished length of the floor.
And the cellos have such slim waists and violins are girls with flattened breasts.
Let us invent the chaise-longue, bamboo, Lapsang Souchong, linen and panama.

You may cough and thump your stick, but I have been up in the attic and I have a bundle of postcards here to prove that once we were seen to be in love on the Riviera in nineteen twenty-four.