Anna McMichael fills us in on her new CD of lullabies, Close your Eyes and I’ll Close Mine.

I first began thinking about collecting and playing lullabies for adults in 2011, a year after moving back to Australia after working for many years as a violinist in the Netherlands.  I wanted music that would soothe but also intrigue people since we often struggle for balance in our busy and stressful modern lives. I raised the project idea with the pianist, Tamara-Anna Cislowska, in the course of our concerts together. She was enthusiastic, being a champion of modern works, and because she had recorded her own CD, Persian Hours, with complementary piano works.

I liked the concept of a genre that integrated older and newer works in a seamless flow of differing colours and textures so I set about finding older but lesser known works from the repertoire for violin and piano. But I mainly also sought out composers I knew both in Australia and abroad who I thought might find the idea appealing. I explained the theme and left it to them and was thrilled when I later received such varied and innovative compositions. I really could not have...

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