Conceived in 1946 when the composer was in his mid-twenties, Lukas Foss' orchestral song cycle on the biblical Song of Songs is chronologically and stylistically situated among his early neo-Classical works, along with such pieces as the Symphony in G (1944) and the Symphony of Chorales (1956). In approaching the evocative and often erotic Song of Songs, texts from which have been set by countless composers, Foss chose rather subdued verses in which divine and romantic love are conflated through subtle metaphors rather than explicit descriptions. The expressive depth of the chosen texts remain, but leave room for emotional elaboration and nuance through Foss' orchestral rendering. In fact, the four movements of the piece actually draw on several different portions of the text, arranged in such a way as to lend each movement and the work as a whole a compelling dramatic contour that is further articulated through music. Much of the first movement, which primarily draws on the regenerative images of the wind and the dawn from the fourth biblical song, is obsessive over an initial gesture of a rising fifth followed by a lower neighbor tone. Beginning in the winds as an ostinato, it multiplies to permeate the orchestral texture in dense imitation. The entrance of the voice highlights a new gesture, which likewise infiltrates the accompaniment. A change of mood brings a change of pace and whereas before, the soloist elaborated the words in a fluid, reiterative manner, the words are now declaimed with sturdy, unadorned purpose while the orchestra lurches forward with new urgency. The second movement, marked Aria, is in a lilting, syncopated 6/8 meter and a folkish minor mode that corresponds with the playful insistence of the text: "Come my beloved, let us go forth into the fields...Let us see if the vine flourish...." The metaphor of springtime and its emerging flora assumes a more seductive tone in the recitative-like middle section, followed by a da capo that resumes the coy play of the opening. The third movement is the most dramatic, perhaps partly for what is not contained therein. Foss omits the rather explicit sexual metaphors found in the text surrounding his excerpted lines, retaining only the description of the speaker's intense longing for her love and her vain search for him. The score fills in the gaps in the text, however, with a highly chromatic, harmonic language and an almost expressionistically fluid texture that surges and ebbs in waves of ascending lines. The vocal line takes on a conflicted, angular quality, reaching its dramatic peak with an exposed high A that suddenly leaps downwards a full octave and a half. The brief but emotionally concentrated fourth movement, with a harmonic lucidity and measured pace that starkly contrasts the anxiety of the third, elegantly sets the most tender and devotional of the texts, a line taken from the eighth song: "Set me as a seal upon thine heart...as a seal upon thine arm: for love is stronger than death."

© All Music Guide