“And after winter folweth grene May”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

“The month of May has come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit”
— Thomas Malory

“Forgive me if, in friendship’s way,
I offer thee a wreath of May…
Nourished by the dews of heaven…”
– John Clare

“As full of spirit as the month of May”
— William Shakespeare

“May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope”
— Emily Brontë

“Among the changing months, May stands confest the sweetest, and in fairest colours dressed”
— James Thomson

“I thought that spring must last forevermore; for I was young and loved, and it was May”
— Vera Brittain

“So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May”
— Marcel Proust

“At last came the golden month of the wild folk — honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the dawning year”
— Samuel Scoville Jr

“May bursts, the rainbow of the months, sent as a sign — a promise of fruition”
– The National Magazine, May 1899

“But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,
Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away”
― WB Yeats

“Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!”
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Most people liked it best in the early spring, when the woods down to the river seemed to shift almost before one’s eyes from snowdrop white to daffodil yellow to the shimmer of bluebells … I shall always remember it with the profoundest gratitude, though, as it was that May, that last May, in the last of my old summers”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“And a bird overhead sang Follow,
And a bird to the right sang Here;
And the arch of the leaves was hollow,
And the meaning of May was clear”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne

Piano trio on tour

THE Greenwich Trio come to Dorset and Somerset for the May series of Concerts in the West, with recitals at Bridport arts centre on Friday 15th May at 11.30am, Ilminster arts centre that evening at 7.30pm and Crewkerne Dance House on Saturday at 7.30.

Formed in London in 2006, and marking their 20th anniversary this year, the Greenwich Trio brings together Slovenian violinist Lana Trotovšek, Canadian cellist Heather Tuach and Japanese pianist Yoko Misumi.

They made their mark quickly – described by one reviewer as the “New Beaux Arts Trio” – and come to Concerts in the West with an exciting programme that includes some less familiar works.

They open with Beethoven’s Piano Trio op 1, no 1, followed by Jennifer Higdon’s Piano Trio, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s Piano Trio, op 11, and Elegy Half Erased by Robert Humber, a composer from Newfoundland, who is a singer-songwriter, producer and sound explorer, who releases alt folk androck music under the name R Sheaves and experimental and contemporary classical-ambient music under his own name.