Score 0-571-51439-1 on sale and parts available on special sale from the Hire Library.

Roman Canticle was written as a result of a commission from the Nash Ensemble for their 25th anniversary year with funds provided by IBM (UK). It is scored for mezzo-soprano with flute, viola and harp, the instrumental combination used by Debussy in his Sonata (1917), which has often featured in Nash concerts. Nicholas Maw first heard Browning’s poem Two in the Campagna read by Sir John Gielgud some years ago; and it made a deep impression on him. He later visited Italy and fell in love with Rome and its surrounding countryside – the Campagna – just as Browning's did a century earlier. The poem deals with the intangibility of human love, the ‘infinite passion and the pain of finite hears that yearn’. The work is dedicated with affection to the composer’s daughter Natasha and her husband Paul, who were married in Italy in 1996.