Format : Vocal Score
Celebrating the life of Robert Van Allan (20th October 1979 - 21st June 1999). Commissioned by Rosemary Pickering the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. First performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival Chorus and Children's Choir on Saturday 2nd May 2009 St Andrew's Hall Norwich. Texts by Wordsworth Charles Causley Langston Hughes WJ Turner Thomas Traherne John Keats Emily Dickinson Tennyson Whitman.
SKU: PE.EP72785A
ISBN 9790577011349. 210 x 297mm inches. English.
From the composer:
How did it all begin? And what happened next?
I found myself pondering these questions in an art gallery in Bremen, in a James Turrell installation that carved through three storeys of the gallery. Looking down from the top floor through great circles of colour-changing light to the distant sparkling points in a dark ellipse on the ground floor, I felt that I was looking back in time to the origins of the universe – and I started to hear children’s voices in my mind’s ear, accompanied by twinkling metal percussion.
It occurred to me that the beginning of our world was a good story to be sung by children, especially the unique Hallé Children’s Choir, and accompanied by the magnificent Hallé Orchestra.
Haydn’s Creation immediately comes to mind as a precedent, but that is a setting and elaboration of the Book of Genesis. I thought we should tell the modern version of our story, and be as scientifically accurate as possible.
That’s easier said than done! For a start, it’s hard to find a modern account of creation that is anything like as compact as the one in Genesis. I talked about it with my regular collaborator, Alasdair Middleton. Neither of us could remember being taught anything about the Big Bang or Evolution at school, although I had certainly spent many happy hours making papier-mâché dinosaurs. So the first thing we had to do was a lot of research – reading books for grown-ups, books for children, looking at charts and diagrams and watching films. There was a wonderful moment, reading Adam Rutherford’s The Origin of Life, when I had the glorious feeling I understood everything – but that quickly evaporated as soon as I put the book down.
Scientific ideas seem to date very quickly, so this account of the beginning of our world is necessarily provisional. It&rs.
