This box set contains three CDs that are also available separately from MN Records: MNRCD108 Six Celan Songs, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi MNRCD109 Acts of Beauty, Exit no Exit MNRCD114 8 Lust Songs, I Sonetti Lussuriosi Six Celan SongsThe Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of BeautyExit no Exit present compelling examples of Michael Nyman's vibrant approach to wordsetting, song structure and subject matter. Six Celan Songs is Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper and, together with The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of his major vocal pieces and a pair of his favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard. Acts of Beauty is a song cycle based on miscellaneous texts on beauty from a 1556 text of Vincenzo Cartari, which looks at the measurements of beauty by comparing buttocks to beauty in the urban environment as viewed by Kurt Schwitters and Dzuga Vertov to Martial's Epigrams on another kind of sexual measurement, the weighing of penis. Exit no Exit began life as 'Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores', a 'homage' to the England football team as part of a BBC Radio 3 documentary on the 2002 World Cup finals. Rewritten for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company in 2006, John Motson's voice is replaced with a bass clarinet which not only imitates the commentator's highly idiosyncratic speech patterns, but also takes off from these with a concertante part of some virtuosity. 8 Lust Songs is a song cycle in which Nyman's music is set to the erotic poems of the 16th century poet Pietro Aretino. The poems were inspired by Marcantonio Raimondi's engravings of couples in various positions of sexual intercourse. A Renaissance equivalent of the Kama Sutra, the poems and engravings caused huge outrage at the time of publication, banned by the Papal authorities and nearly all copies destroyed. They are the most important erotic texts of the period and have gone on to inspire writers and artists alike for centuries.