Nancy Litten’s “These Sweet Days‘ for piano. C659
Review in International Piano
by Murray McLachlan
November 2025.
Clifton Edition presents these 10 Grade 6-8 pieces by Nancy Litten that ever-enterprising composer, teacher, adjudicator and educator, inspired by great poems. In an era when verse can be overlooked or misunderstood it is inspiring to see attractive, contrasted and well-crafted intermediate-level piano pieces inspired by Shakespeare, Browning, Hopkins, Scott Fitzgerald and more. Heinrich Heine famously commented that ‘Music begins where words stop’ and Litten illustrates this throughout this anthology. I love the poignant simplicity of ‘Be my love in the rain’, after Robert Frost, as well as the melodic memorability of ‘These sweet days’ and the bucolic exuberance with ‘Laughter and the love of friends’. Litten often has a wonderfully infectious musical twinkle in her eye, and I smiled when trying out her tribute number for Liberace, ‘Show me a hero’, inspired by Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The CrackUp’: It most certainly lives up to the initial direction to play ‘In a swanky style’.
