When commissioned by UC Berkeley to compose a major work, Steven Stucky turned to the poetry of Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. One of Stucky ´s favorite writers, Milosz fled to the US in 1960, and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1961. He was still at Berkeley, his poems still banned back home in Poland, when he won the Nobel Prize in 1980. Many of his poems are dark, and some deal with the Holocaust. The Stars and the Roses sets three lighter, more lyrical poems for tenor and orchestra: "...

1. Happiness (tr. Richard Lourie) - 2. The Sun (tr. Czeslaw Milosz) - 3. The Bird Kingdom (tr. Czeslaw Milosz)