The Diary of One Who Disappeared

The Diary of One Who Disappeared: performed by Joshua Ellicott (Tenor), Jeremy Denk (Piano) playing Bach; Prelude and Fugue in B minor; Beethoven; Piano Sonata in A flat major Op 110; Janácek; The Diary of One Who Disappeared at Dirleton Kirk, Dirleton on Sat 19 Sept 3pm as part of the Lammermuir Festival. Forbidden love - a young farmer's overwhelming infatuation with a gypsy girl - is a subject that Janácek could identify with all too easily, given his own unrequited passion for a much younger woman in the last years of his life. In The Diary of One Who Disappeared, a cycle of 22 songs on that theme, he captures the poetry's eroticism and emotional turbulence in music of white-hot theatrical intensity that makes it as much a mini-opera as a song cycle. Joshua Ellicott, one of our finest dramatic singers, is ideally partnered by Jeremy Denk in this gripping work. Beethoven the radical individualist would surely recognise a kindred spirit in Janácek and Jeremy's choice of his late A flat sonata as a companion work seems entirely appropriate.