October - December 2011

Dear Friends,

At long last we are finally ready! Our garden has yielded and we hope that you like the new crop.
After 2 years of writing, pre-production, demoing, scrapping, sieving and filtering, 11 songs are now recorded, packaged, manufactured and on their way hopefully to your local shop or online store.The album is entitled - “Winter Poem”.

We love to choose titles that are important to us and reflect where we are at the time of writing. Winter is a very special time for us in Secret Garden, the long dark nights tend to bring out the melancholy creative side of Rolf! This, balanced out with hopeful, crisp white snowy Norwegian days, a frozen landscape that inspires and helps us through the darkest nights!

Over the years we have been asked so many times to make a seasonal Christmas album. To date, we have not wanted to go there. Our inspiration comes from many different places and we did not feel we were the best choice to produce another “Santa Type” song. But still in saying that we know there is nothing more yummy than cuddling up in front of a warm fireplace at this very special time on a cold winters night, sharing thoughts and memories accompanied by lovely music!

We hope this album, Winter Poem, can be your new sound track to this very special time ahead and yes, we succumbed! ....
We have included a special Christmas song called “Mary’s Lament”. The lyrics are once again by Brendan Graham who partnered with us on “You Raise Me Up” as well as nearly all the songs in our last album, ‘Inside Im Singing’! The vocalist on “Mary’s Lament” is the wonderful Irish singer Fionnuala Gill who previously recorded with us on our ‘Earthsongs’ album with another Brendan Graham lyric called “Sleepsong”.

Moya Brennan, the vocalist from Clannad, has also joined us on this CD singing a song called “The Dream” - words and music written by Rolf. We have always wanted to work with Moya as we feel her unique voice is a perfect fit for our music, but we waited until we had the right song for her and this finally happened with “The Dream”.

Rolf also wrote the words and music to the other song on the Cd “Powered By Nature”. The full production of “Powered by Nature” actually grew out of an entire suite which we were commissioned to write and record for the Shanghai Expo 2010 as part of a multi-media presentation at the Norwegian Pavilion. The Suite is also featured on “Winter Poem”.

Once the Suite was completed, Rolf buried himself once more during the dark nights of last winter writing the rest of the music on the album. Emerging into the spring light in March, we began to record in earnest, taking in studios in Ireland, Prague, London and Norway.

In Prague we had the honor of recording with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, something we have wanted to do for many years!

By end of August we went into “Mix” mode, then post production and finally here we are today! In addition, we also managed to perform for a week at a festival in Kyoto, Japan was broadcast on Japanese TV on November 3rd. We love this festival, the temple was breathtakingly beautiful, a real privilege to perform there. We also got to perform Luxembourg in July for the first time.

In between recording and production Fionnuala managed to release her own solo CD, ‘Songs From Before’ in the past 12 months and is thrilled with the response thusfar.

RTE (Irish National Broadcasting Corp) made a 30 minute documentary of her life during the past year which was aired in August to great acclaim.

So with great pleasure and a little trepidation we now hand over our new album to you all. We hope it will give you many moments of pleasure, as it has been a true joy for us to create Winter Poem.

Its been a long road for us since 1995 and we want thank each and every one you who have travelled this road together with us and truly hope you like the new “station” we’ve arrived at with Winter Poem. This has been a very personal and special album for us and we hope you enjoy!

Lots of Love from,
Fionnuala and Rolf