Description
An arrangement of a piece from Ross’ chamber opera called Christina’s World (1983) with words by Dorothy Hewett, Christina’s Lullaby (2009) can be performed by a solo female voice or combined women’s voices in unison. Dorothy has described Christina’s World as “an allegory or fable about illusion and reality and the truth and lies of memory.” Christina, in middle age, is obsessed by a desire to return to the house of her childhood and the life of the imagination she created there – a kind of second Eden of lost childhood and the Pastoral Dream. She succeeds in conjuring her young self, a hesitant and idealistic dream figure who gradually takes on the characteristics of a ‘real’ Christina – a contradictory, perverse, tragi-comic adolescent with a fierce egocentric life of her own. (The Youtube demo is sung by Greta Bradman).