‘Rainsongs’ is a collection of premiere recordings by Karel Janovický  featuring Lesley Jane Rogers (soprano), John Turner one of the world’s leading recorder players, and Joan Taylor (piano).

The album features the song cycle ‘Rainsongs’, settings of poems by George Szirtes which were written in 2010 in memory of the composer Mátyás Seiber. A second song cycle, ‘Passages of Flight’, comprises five poems which were chosen by their author Richard Robbins himself out of some two hundred he had written under the title ‘Passages of Flight’. The rest of the programme features instrumental works by Janovický which are regularly played by performers worldwide.

Karel Janovický was born in 1930 in the west-Bohemian town of Pilsen (Plzeň) in the then Czechoslovakia. In 1949 he left the country for Germany and a year later came to England to study and eventually to settle. He received a Master of Music degree from the Royal College of Music and had composition lessons with Mátyás Seiber. In 1953 he was awarded the Dutch Gaudeamus Foundation prize and in 1957 won the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra ‘Garland for Shakespeare’ competition with his Variations on a theme of Robert Johnson, op.17, premiered subsequently by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Sir Charles Groves.