A Playlist: For These Distracted Times
A few weeks ago, I decided to post some playlists on my SoundCloud account, designed to relate in some ways to the current Covid-19 crisis. The first of them went under a title that was borrowed from Thomas Tomkins’ 1649 composition A Sad Pavane for these Distracted Times. This was written just a couple of weeks after the execution of Charles I and under the clouds of the England’s turbulent Civil War.
(Incidentally, the picture attached to the playlist is a photograph of Sibelius’ house Ainola, near Järvenpää in Finland, which I took on a visit in 2015.)
My playlist contains 9 tracks, most of them my own work but also including a few pieces by other composers. The first, Descendit Sicut Pluvia, is a short choral work based on plainsong and dates from 2005, the time of the London Tube bombings. It is dedicated to the memory of Richard Ellery, a relative of mine who was killed in the blast near Aldgate station. The performance here was the first, given in the chapel of St John’s College by a choir directed by a then Homerton student, Scott Inglis-Kidger. After that comes the slow and reflective middle movement of my concerto for piano and orchestra, The Magic Mountain. This title comes from the 1924 novel by Thomas Mann, as does that of this particular movement, Ocean of Time.
13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was originally composed for a dance group, and has proved to be my most popular track on SoundCloud. I still love the ensemble I devised for this piece – oboe (doubling cor anglais), harp, harpsichord (doubling celesta) and string trio. Next comes a group of short vocal works, interrupted by a brief instrumental transcription of a song by Dufay (c. 1397 – 1474). This is called Se la Face ay Pale but if our faces are pale at the moment, it’s most likely the cause isn’t unrequited love! Echo is a setting of a poem by Anna Akhmatova, Cut Grass is one by Philip Larkin; both of these are for a soprano with a small group of instruments.
C. V. Stanford in Vanity Fair, 1905
Leslie Ward / Public domain
The beautiful motet by Charles Villiers Stanford was originally composed for the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Stanford was appointed organist as an undergraduate. Later, at the age of just 29, he was a founding professor of the newly created Royal College of Music, and became Professor of Music at Cambridge as well from 1887. I chose his set of 3 Motets op. 38, of which this is the second, as part of a Composer’s Choice programme for Radio 3.
My valedictory Nunc Dimittis was written for and first performed by the Charter Choir of Homerton College earlier this year, in one of the last Evensongs before the virus struck. To end the playlist, I chose the middle movement of Mozart’s Piano Concert K. 453. This is a particularly poignant performance for me: the soloist was my old friend Nicholas Toller, and I conducted it in the West Road Concert Hall of the Music Faculty in 1990. Nick very sadly took his own life in 2007, and I dedicated my Piano Trio written in the following year to his memory. That work is also on the SoundCloud but not as part of this playlist.
I hope very much that the music included in this sequence might bring a little peace and calm in these dark and difficult times.
