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).
I had always been an enthusiastic listener of all types of music, including classical, which started when I was young when my parents would play classical music from CDs. At school I learned to play the cello and joined the school orchestra. I liked the cello because its range is so similar to that of the human voice, which makes it sound more expressive and rich.
Directed by Floriane Peycelon, the ensemble delivered a programme focusing primarily on women composers, with a scintillating Suite for Strings by Libby Croad; a movement from the wonderfully colourful Piano Quintet by Louise Farrenc, for which the ensemble was joined by first-year pianist, Ronja Haller; an enigmatic compositional response to Tallis’ If Ye Love Me by local composer Juliet Lewis (who also conducted the piece); before the programme closed with a full-blooded string orchestral ‘reimagining’ of music from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with the closing Lament featuring final-year student, Jack Chan, on solo viola.
A great programme and an enthusiastic audience; many thanks to the church’s Coffee Concert series for welcoming us.
and the term came to a rousing conclusion with the Big Band’s annual Christmas Swingalong, conducted again by the evergreen Ian Swatman sporting a Christmas Hull City jumper.
And making her debut with the big band was first-year singer, Tayo Fanifosi, whi delivered several crowd-pleasing festive numbers.
Jeska contacted her in March when she was looking for a cellist to add some final parts to her recordings. The album was recorded in different places, mixed and mastered in again other places, including Portugal and Luxembourg. Jeska and Aisha met up at Unison studios in Luxembourg to record the cello lines.
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