Imagine a young lad in love – that is what the piece is about!“ This is how Dvořák himself characterised The Cypresses, a work he composed at the age of twenty-three when he fell for the young actress Josefina Čermáková (who was later to become his sister-in-law). Regardless of the fact that it is a juvenile and in many ways imperfect composition, Dvořák kept returning to it, exploiting its motives as material for his later opuses. For his Evening Songs written at a more mature stage of his professional career, he chose equally yearning verses by Czech poet Vítězslav Hálek. Even the poetry of Adolf Heyduk that served as a model for the Gypsy Songs features motives of love, although in a broader sense involving the love of music, nature and freedom. The wife of the famous virtuoso Joseph Joachim took Songs My Mother Taught Me to her heart and the song later became one of Dvořák true “hits” worldwide. Pavol Breslik is an outstanding tenor invited by most prominent opera houses and concert halls (MET, Covent Garden, Salzburg, Zurich, Vienna, Paris, Berlin) and besides operatic works, he focuses on song repertoire. After Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin he took a fancy to Dvořák’s songs and, accompanied flawlessly by Robert Pechanec, imprinted all of his passion into the present recording.