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).
If you missed it, the piece will be performed again on Friday 9 June as part of this year’s Summer Music Week, our annual music festival bringing the musical year to a close.
The piece, written for mixed-voice choir and string orchestra, is a setting of the Magnificat interspersed with four new poems written by Nancy Gaffield in the School of Creative Writing. Each poem, inspired by an historic painting, responds to the canticle, the ‘Song of Mary,’ in which Mary rejoices that she will give birth to the Christ-child and the positive changes which will be wrought in the world.
Recently named one of the Evening Standard’s 1000 Most Influential People in London, Russell Hepplewhite has won critical acclaim for his ground-breaking operas for children including Shackleton’s Cat, Silver Electra and Laika the Spacedog, written for English Touring Opera. His music appears on CD releases for labels including Regent Records and has been featured on BBC Television and Radio, as well as being performed at venues including the Royal Albert Hall, the Wigmore Hall, the Library Theatre Luton, the Purcell Room and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Most recently, his collaboration with the poet Michael Rosen, a set of children’s songs entitled Everything, is included in the Friday Afternoons song bank project, inspired by Britten’s song-cycle of the same name.