The first four songs on this program, devoted to different aspects of love, are all by women composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. French composer Lili Boulanger was the younger sister of the great pianist and teacher Nadia Boulanger; American composer Elinor Remick Warren was Nadia’s student. We also hear one work by the late-Romantic American composer Amy Beach.

At the age of 57, Joseph Haydn composed a virtuosic cantata in which the Cretan princess Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, laments and rages by the seashore. Haydn—always prone to bold harmonic experimentation—vividly conveys the inner turmoil and rapidly shifting emotions of a woman in extremis.

British composer Iain Bell’s love affair with the human voice is evident in his considerable output of vocal works. His song cycle of you, on poems by E. E. Cummings, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and receives its world premiere this evening. This work explores the experience of love through the prism of the senses and celebrates the sensual quality of the mezzo-soprano voice.

With a catalog of more than 500 compositions, Grammy Award–winning composer Libby Larsen has given many singers cause to rejoice. In her song cycle Love after 1950, different women poets tell of modern love from the woman’s (often disillusioned) point of view. Each song is a different genre: Tonight we hear blues, honky-tonk, and tango.

Two French songs follow: Maurice Ravel’s rendition of the immortal Don Quixote singing a drunken but joyous serenade to his Dulcinea, and Henri Duparc’s exquisite love song to “Phidylé,” her name permanently engraved in our memory in the wake of this inimitable French mélodie. We end with one of Richard Strauss’s most passionate love songs to “Cäcilie,” or Cecilia—the name of both the poet’s wife and the patron saint of music.