December 2023

The Year’s Midnight

I was thrilled to conduct the first performance of my new cantata ‘The Year’s Midnight’ on 13th December 2023, with the massed voices and strings of Yehudi Menuhin School performing.

This was a very special evening with Gillian Clarke, who wrote the wonderful texts for this piece, attending in person. I thoroughly enjoyed preparing this project with the students of the school, and performing alongside them in the finale concert of our Winter Festival felt fantastic.

Above is a short sample from the performance, and alongside this I will be putting more excerpts online in the coming weeks.

Score videos online

I have added a number of extra score videos to my YouTube channel, including the festive pieces’The Oxen’ and ‘On Chrstimas Morn’, which both features on SANSARA’s 2019 album ‘The Waiting Sky’. You can hear the full album below, also. You will also find score videos below for my pieces Alma Redemptoris Mater, and O Sacrum Convivium.

New projects for 2024

I am excited for a number of projects to come to fruition this coming year, many of which I have been working on throughout December. 2024 is shaping up to include a variety of performances of my work all over the world, and I am really excited to share this information with you closer to the time!

The main projects I will be working on this year are:

  • Finalising the Piano Concerto and workshopping the piece with Matthew Schellhorn

  • A new work for Wind Quintet

  • A new work for string trio

  • An extended work for two pianos

  • A song cycle for soprano and piano

  • A set of Petrarch sonnet settings for solo male soprano

  • A new setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for choir and organ

Lots of exciting opportunities and I will add more information to this blog throughout the year to show the plans all materialising!

November 2023

November 2023 saw the further development of the projects that I had been working on in October.

  • The piano concerto is starting to take shape, and work on the final movement has been progressing well. I will be meeting with Matthew Schellhorn over Christmas to discuss technical aspects of the piece and to see how ideas can be developed further.

  • Rehearsals have been going well for my new cantata ‘The Year’s Midnight’, which we will perform on 13th December at the Menuhin Hall in Cobham as part of the Winter Festival at Yehudi Menuhin School.

  • Further work continues on ‘Daylight’, my new work for two pianos, and the third movement of this piece has been progressing well.

  • Discussions continue for my new work for Wind Quintet based on the work of Ellie Cliftlands, and I will post more details about this project soon!

I am excited to share with you the score video for ‘Ubi Caritas’, performed by SANSARA on our single composer disc of my works from 2021, Invisible Cities. You can hear the full album below.

I am also very excited to share with you a performance video of my piece ‘Returning’ for Cello and Piano, which I recorded with Ozgur Kaya. The piece includes many improvisatory passages where the instrumentalists interact in a very organic way. I hope you enjoy this performance!

October 2023

October 2023 was another good month for the development of projects and composing. I pushed further ahead with the piano concerto, which currently has two movements complete, and as part of the composition process I will be workshopping sections of the piece with Matthew Schellhorn in the coming months.

I was delighted that my piece Ave sanctissima Maria has received further performances, and you can hear a new live version by Luxensemblen below:

I have also been working on the following projects, all of which are tremendously exciting!

  • A new string quartet work for friends based on prints by Hokusai

  • A new commission from a variety of accordion orchestras based in Switzerland, which will be setting texts by Pablo Neruda

  • An expansion of my two piano work ‘Daylight’, one movement of which was originally composed for the celebration of wonderful piano teacher Ruth Nye’s 90th birthday, which we celebrated at the Yehudi Menuhin School last year.

  • A new wind quintet based on the work of fabulous visual artist Ellie Cliftlands, whom I have known since I can’t remember. Her wonderful engravings capture tiny insights into beautifully complex moments. The engravings I am basing my movements on are ‘Drummond Greenhouse’, ‘Anglesey Abbey’, and ‘Attingham Park, Kitchen garden’. Her work can be found here: https://www.elliecliftlands.co.uk/printmaking

Above on the right you will see a link to a score video of my first opera Rothschild’s Violin, I was able to upload the score follower videos again, so I hope you enjoy hearing the performance!

August 2023

August 2023 has been an incredibly productive month for me. I completed my new cantata The Year’s Midnight, for strings and choir, which we will perform in the Menuhin Hall on 13th December 2023 with the massed voices of the Yehudi Menuhin School and their wonderful strings. This has been a fascinating project as I originally wrote to Gillian Clarke (former National Poet of Wales), with whom I had collaborated years ago, to ask whether a potential collaboration might be of interest. Gillian wrote back enthusiastically, and within a matter of months I received six brand new poems on the theme of winter emerging into spring. I have included Gillian’s wonderful poems at the bottom of this post.

One particular part of the text:

We step out to see the sky,

dusk and the dying day

on fire before it fades.

The west is a rose-gold page,

an illuminated story

in the book of winter,

Really captured my imagination, and when this text begins the fourth movement I wanted a sense of movement through space, and the use of an ostinato helped me to navigate this.

My current project is a new Piano Concerto entitled Symmetry for Matthew Schellhorn, and leading on from the creative energy from The Year’s Midnight, I am now well into the second movement of this piece, but more on that another time!

II. December

The earth glitters with frost,

Flagstones are pearled with cold.

Frost flares its jewellery

till dusk rubs out the world

and the long night begins.

Short days stir with wings

as hunger brings the birds

to feed on what we throw them,

before the dark descends,

and the silent night.

Green dissolves in grey.

In windows, street by street,

the tree-lights shine. Above

a million stars out-glow

the darkness in the heart.

IV. Christmas Sunset

We step out to see the sky,

dusk and the dying day

on fire before it fades.

The west is a rose-gold page,

an illuminated story

in the book of winter,

the journey to Bethlehem,

no more the plod of a camel,

but flight over seas

and plane-trails burning.

We have lit the fuse.

Earth holds its breath.

VI. Blackbird

The blackbird is silent. In a month

he’ll sing his Latin aria from the spire

of a chestnut tree, leafless

in winter sleep, its buds tight closed.

In lengthening days,

each with a few more minutes of light,

he’ll repossess his ground

with his first song of the year,

Let’s dream a hymn to joy,

a new year and a baby born,

and the blackbird singing in a tree,

veni, vidi, vici, veni, vidi, vici.

Over this month, work progressed very quickly on this piece. I found the energy that Gillian brought to the project inspiring, and as a result, the ideas for the piece crystallised in my mind very quickly. I knew that in between each pair of songs I wanted the strings to represent murmurations of starlings, which are mentioned in the first song. Here’s a sample of the score from the first murmuration:

The setting of the text was so enjoyable for this project, as Gillian’s words really flow naturally. Her talent for selecting such evocative imagery pushed me to find a harmonic language that inhabited a dark landscape, which emerges into the F major mixolydian mode joy at the end of the sixth movement.

Composing on the go

I am very grateful to Birdsong Publishing for producing the full score, vocal score, and parts, which we will begin rehearsing from at YMS from the second week of September. It would be great to see you at the first performance!

I. The Dark Month

Month of the dying, the dead.

Trees groan in the winter wind,

green dissolves into grey,

city pavements pearl with ice.

Nature sleeps. All life is still

but for the stir of wings,

starved birds flock to the feeders,

murmurations of starlings.

Deep winter, world is singing.

Light the dark with candles.

Sing away silence for a child,

born two thousand years ago.

III. The Year’s Midnight

the shortest day, 21st December

The flown, the fallen,

the golden ones,

the deciduous dead all gone

to ground, to dust, to sand,

borne on the shoulders of the wind.

Listen! They are whispering

now while the world talks,

and the ice melts.

and the seas rise.

Look at the trees!

Every leaf scar is a bud

expecting a future.

The earth speaks in parables.

The burning bush. The rainbow.

Promises. Promises.

V. Full Cold Moon

26th December 2023

Midnight, late December,

and the Full Cold Moon is rising

over the city streets, the suburbs,

the villages, the lonely farm.

Luminous old stone,

it draws the tide over our shores,

turns all to silver, park and garden,

pavement, pool and puddle.

It pulls the sea, the heart, the blood,

decides the fertile hour when a seed

is woken in the secret dark

to slow unfolding, and a life begins.