It’s always both exciting and a little bit daunting, taking on a contemporary piece of music to give the UK premiere – and even more so when the composer herself is in the audience!
Last weekend saw the Music department’s combination of concerts, ‘Winter Journeys, Winter Nights‘ featuring the String Sinfonia, Concert Band, Chorus, Orchestra, Cecilian Choir and Flute Choir coming together over two nights to perform seasonal works, the centrepiece of which was a marvellously colourful seasonal cantata, Winter Nights, by the Canadian composer, Stephanie Martin. This five-movement work sets a variety of poems focusing on different aspects of the winter season, from the anonymous ‘Cold is the night when when stars shine bright,’ through the fierce drama of ‘Loud rings the frozen earth’ by James Thompson, to the wonder and mystery of Cori Martin’s ‘Could it be true / Old Thomas Hardy’s tale,’ all culminating in Thomas Campion’s ‘Now winter nights enlarge.’
The piece distils a variety of colours, textures and vivid images from the cast of voices, strings and percussion, reflecting the manifold aspects of the season, and the whole cantata captures the full range of the season’s contrasts – its warmth, magic, wonder, jollity, bitterness, wildness, and revelry – bringing the different scenes to vivid life with a vibrant energy.
We were delighted to welcome Stephanie to the afternoon rehearsal – always a slightly scary moment, the first time performing a piece in front of the composer – and then to the evening performance. With warmth and generosity, Stephanie talked with the performers in the afternoon about the piece, including the three students singing the solo trio heralding the arrival of Winter; and she received a hugely enthusiastic round of applause following the performance later that evening.
Congratulations to all the performers involved across the entire weekend, and our thanks in particular to Stephanie for taking the time to stop over in Canterbury on her flight from Europe to Canada, to come to Colyer-Fergusson and be part of the event.
Here is the performance in full, filmed and used with kind permission from Stephanie Martin.
Read the full weekend programme here (PDF).
Directed by Floriane Peycelon, the players gave a spirited reading of Arensky’s Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky (a theme most often heard in the carol ‘A Crown of Roses’), followed by a performance of John Woolrich’s evocative Ulysses Wakes, featuring postgraduate Music Performance Scholar reading Chemistry, Kira Hilton, as soloist.
The String Sinfonia is back in action on Friday 31 March in Colyer-Fergusson Hall; more details 
It’s no understatement to say that Carols for Choirs has become as much a part of tradition at Christmas as the decorated tree and tinsel; for many, Christmas simply isn’t Christmas without that opening solo verse of Once in Royal David’s City lifting clear into the vaulted roof, the wonderful intimacy of his arrangements of Away in a Manger and Silent Night, or robust settings of The Twelve Days of Christmas or I Saw Three Ships. The first volume in the series was published in the 1960s, and the 100 Carols for Choirs published in 1987 is the go-to carol collection for most choirs. A chorister’s Christmas begins around mid-autumn with that first cracking open of the anthology; the collection ranges from arrangements of popular carols together with lesser-known pieces, and has become the staple of choirs the world over, both amateur and professional. And if you’ve learned a carol descant, chances are it’s one from the book. Arguments about whether, between them, Willcocks and Rutter combined to save the tradition of choral Christmas carol-singing will no doubt continue, but it’s certainly fair to say that they provided an accessible, richly-rewarding and enduringly popular collection that has contributed much to keeping carol-singing alive and in rude health well into the twenty-first century.
Hail and farewell, Sir David, who leaves behind an enduring legacy at the heart of music-making at Christmas.
His music defies those neat genre-defining labels that critics and music shop stockists love: classical, minimalist, techno, jazz. Combining repetition, polyphonic rhythmic inventiveness, sampled and electronic sounds and a tonal language glittering with bright colours, it’s a music that refuses to be neatly pigeon-holed.
It’s a masterpiece: the visual element is so brilliantly rendered in the orchestral score that it almost makes a staged realisation unnecessary. The glittering yet bloody armoury, the sweeping views of Bluiebeard’s seemingly limitless kingdom, the dazzling treasury where the priceless artefacts are tinged with blood, the lake of tears – the music creates these scenes so well, you almost don’t need to see a stage production’s version: better to leave it to the imagination.