Programme

'Walking Dwelling Thinking' - music by Amy Crankshaw, poem by Rebecca Hurst

'Wind in Trees' - music by Jasmine Simons, poem by Vona Groarke

'October and October and October' (Stones and Sweeper) - music by Finn McLean, poem by Chad Campbell

'Pyramid' - music by Simon Davies, poem by Frances Leviston

Interval

'Erysichthon's Forest' - music by Richard Whalley, text by John McAuliffe:

Erysichthon's Proposal

Erysichthon's Axe

Mestra's Lament

Simon Grange

Bass

Recent winner of the inaugural Mastersingers competition main prize and audience award, British bass, Simon Grange, graduated from the Royal College of Music in 2015, where he was a Cuthbert Smith Scholar supported by a Soirée d'Or award and Douglas and Hilda Simmonds and Hans and Mary Romney award. He was previously a student and choral scholar at Oxford University where he read English Literature. He currently studies with Matthew Best and Martin Pickard. Career highlights have included Bluff in Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor at the Teatru Manoel in Malta, Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni for Clonter Opera, covering Reinmar in Wagner's Tannhäuser for Longborough Opera Festival, performing as Bartolo (Il Nozze di Figaro) and Basilio (Il Barbiere di Siviglia) a young artist with Mid Wales Opera, Sparafucile in Verdi’s Rigoletto (Regents Opera), Fiesco in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra (Fulham Opera), and Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (Fulham Opera). Future performances include Collatinus in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia (Palace Opera), Colline in Puccini’s La Boheme (cover, Mid Wales Opera), and Reinmar in Wagner's Tannhäuser (Saffron Opera Group). Next season he joins the ensemble at Opera North and is represented by Steven Philips Artist Management.

Louise Wayman

Soprano

Louise studied at the Wales International Academy of Voice with Dennis O’Neill. Previously she studied at Birmingham Conservatoire, winning several prizes.

Opera credits include Amore in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Papagena in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Micaëla in Bizet’s Carmen , Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Soprano Solo 4 in Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, Giannetta in The Elixir of Love by Donizetti, Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Una Conversa in Suor Angelica. She has also joined the choruses of Opera North and Wexford Festival Opera.

Louise has sung with a number of international choral and chamber ensembles including Polyphony, the BBC Singers, Collegium Vocale Gent and CantoLX. Solo engagements have included Handel’s Messiah, Mozart’s Vespers and Exsultate Jubilate, Haydn’s Creation and Nelson Mass and a number of Bach Cantatas.

Petr Prause

Cello

Petr Prause is based in Manchester, England, where he has been appointed Director of International Chamber Music Studio and a Senior Cello Tutor in 2010, further strengthening the provision of chamber music at the Royal Northern College of Music.

Since 1997, Petr Prause has been a member of the Talich Quartet. They have been invited to the most important chamber music venues including London, New York, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Prades, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka and of course Rudolfinum in Prague, where they were Ensemble in Residence for the season 2009/10. Petr also joins other outstanding musicians in all kinds of chamber music formations and gives masterclasses at a wide range of international institutions. Recently, he was invited to the Jury of the String Quartet Competitions in Lyon and Munich.

Richard Whalley

Piano

Richard Whalley is a composer and pianist living in Manchester, where he is a Senior Lecturer in Composition at the University of Manchester. As a composer, he is particularly fascinated by the evocation of time and memory and finding musical analogies for shapes, processes and textures found in nature. His music has been performed by numerous outstanding soloists and ensembles, including Psappha, Trio Atem, Ensemble 10/10, the Quatuor Danel, and the Ebonit Saxophone Quartet, and in Gaudeamus 2001, ISCM World Music Days (Flanders) in 2012 and Milan Expo in 2015. His scores are published by Composers Edition and many of his works have been commercially recorded.

Performers

Amy Cranksaw

'Walking Dwelling Thinking' is a song setting of the poem by Rebecca Hurst. The music seeks to embody certain physical sensations that might be experienced when visiting a woodland. The piece is an invitation: the woodland is calling us out of our houses, to interact with it, and to re-discover our relationships to its materials, processes, and inherent vitalities.

Simon Davies

In my setting of Frances Leviston’s arresting poem about urban regeneration and its consequences I have drawn on the idea of sustainability as ‘progress’, recognising that this metaphor is problematic – progress can have its downsides. I have focussed on three striking images in the poem – the landscape of cranes across the city, the pyramid, which I took to reflect both the hierarchy of success and of social exploitation and finally, that of emptiness – the skeleton drinking champagne. The opening section seeks to portray the vertical and horizontal landscape of cranes towering over the city, with music that is tense rather than optimistic, the metallic nature of the cranes emphasised by ’cello harmonics and the laying of a small chain across some of the piano strings. The soprano has vertical leaps while the ’cello provides the horizontal plane. After some hesitancy, ‘progress’ takes over with the protagonist extolling the virtues of selling ‘door to door’ with music that hints at music-hall parody, the accompaniment in perpetual motion – even when she describes the pyramid of success in almost ‘spiritual’ terms. The full flourish of her optimism is followed by collapse – and return to the image of the cityscape, now even bleaker than before, the ’cello speaking in hollow, flattened tones. Will it ever be finished? Will this urban regeneration benefit those who need to live there?

Finn McLean

'October and October and October' sets text from Chad Campbell's poem 'Stones and Sweeper'. The original text takes the form of a dialogue piece, with a structure of question and answer, but when I became most artistically interested in the poem was when I read the text instead as a monologue - imagining one character endlessly interrogating themselves. There's a sense of frustration in the voice when presented this way, almost as if the whole text is asking itself "am I doing enough?". The piano and cello act as a sort of binary chorus to this, conversing not with the singer but more with themselves. Thank you to the entire Songs of Sustainability team for making this piece possible and providing a space for these important conversations to be had through art.

Jasmine Simons

Wind in Trees is a musical setting of Vona Groarke’s poem of the same name. It was composed in early 2022, in conjunction with a series of workshops and discussions with the Songs of Sustainability team, the other selected composers, and performers Simon Grange, Petr Prause and Richard Whalley. In setting Wind in Trees, I was inspired by its whimsical yet powerful imagery, which stirs a number of conflicting feelings in the reader: including confusion, frustration, anger, nostalgia, urgency and, finally, hope. I believe these dramatically contrasting emotions mirror perfectly my (and others’) personal feelings towards the unfolding climate crisis. I also strived to personify ‘The Wind’ throughout, by creating rising and falling lines, bursts of more energy and periods of stasis, which broadly correspond to the poem’s dramatic structure.

Composers

Poems

Walking Dwelling Thinking - Rebecca Hurst

This wood has a thousand exits and entrances:

stiles, gates and tripets, gaps and breaches.

This wood is hammer-pond, chestnut and chalybeate,

charcoal and slag heap, leats and races.

This wood hides the boar-sow in a thickety hemmel;

is home to the scutty, the flindermouse, the kine.

This wood is cut and coppiced and burned.

Each decade catched-hurt—it takes a tumble.

This wood is two green and clay flanks pinched

by the link of iron bridge over water.

This wood keeps its secrets: the peaty-black

knuckerhole where the dragon lies sleeping.

This wood scolds with a tawny owl’s brogue

shrucking and shraping, kewick hoohoo.

This wood is ashen, eldern, and oaken

a mile from the village, ring-fenced, well-trodden.

This wood summons you from out of your house

to walk through leaf-fall and bluebells and moss.

Wind in Trees – Vona Groarke

Tonight the wind tries on fancy dress

in the attic rooms of trees,

crinolines and winkle-pickers,

mustachios and swords,

a jewelled fob-watch keeping time

with my shutters’ throb and hum.

Silks crinkle precisely at my window

and, at my door, an ivory cane

is summoning my name.

I ask will anything ever change.

First the trees say ‘No’ to me.

Then the wind says ‘Yes’.

Stones and Sweeper - Chad Campbell

What news do you bring us?

It's October. The leaves have fallen.

From where? The thicket on the slope?

No. Higher on the ridges, the oaks.

What of the ranger? Of the coast?

The tine of his lantern on the coast.

Who will sweep the leaves from our stones?

I will sweep the leaves from the stones.

Like the woman painted the watches' hands?

Yes, pointing the brushes with their tongues.

You will come to us? October and October?

October and October and October.

And in the meantime? Where will you go?

I will be with the ranger.

Upon the coast?

The thin tine of his lantern on the coast.

We will wait by our stones.

My radium ghosts in the radium oaks.

Pyramid – Frances Leviston

All along the skyline, cranes

quiet above rooftops,

conspicuous as knives dropped

vertically into carpet,

folded ironing-board-upright

or set at right-

angles, corner brackets

bolting the sky to the ground.

They dangle claws on chains,

unbaited hooks

balanced by elevated breeze-blocks,

into the unfinished town,

fishing a pond

that hasn’t been stocked.

Their paint-work’s bright as macs

in rain, or the mops and pans

a woman once persuaded me to sell

door to door,

describing in the air

of her living room a pyramid,

most mysterious

of all mysterious extancies, her red

nail climbing floors

to the vertex, where it stood,

or floated,

as she effortlessly said

“in no time at all

you’ll have a lifestyle just like mine…”

Through the cranes’

necks the cloudburst rings,

across the clad

stone hotel still missing

its penthouse, its punchline,

bucketing down

like the old cartoon

where a skeleton drinks champagne.

Erysichthon's Forest

-music by Richard Whalley, text by John McAuliffe

Erysichthon's Proposal

Erisychthon: Here we are, at the old wood, my wood,

where, as a child, you played.

Mestra: I did, father,

Erisychthon: By this old oak, Mestra,

I remember it too, hatching plans here...

Mestra: Remember acorns? I'd pick from the oak for you.

And bare winter days I’d climb it into the blue.

Coming here I felt part of its family

It’s good to be back under this this tree

Erisychthon: And I’m still making plans, and where better to tell you.

Mestra: What’s this plan, father, I heard you roaring, earlier,

At the supervisor on the factory floor

Erisychthon: Was I roaring, Mestra? Should I calm down?

Listen, this land is paid for, mine,

Ours. If I plan to burn it down

and tear the earth, I can, it’s mine.

Mestra: Is that your plan, father. [WOODS]

Erisychthon: The wood that I cut, Mestra, I will not burn;

this wood will be the makings of a new town,

and best of all, the wedding hall

where one day you will be married.

Mestra: Where I get married...?

Erisychthon: A shining, gleaming wedding hall,

In the middle of my new town,

perched on that little hill,

overlooking all I own

Mestra: Father, it’s true

that it’s the Planner decides,

but this wood Father

is sacred to a god,

the god who must bless

a wedding hall.

Erisychthon: Forget Her. Watch me make,

with my bare hands and this sharp axe,

your shining gleaming wedding hall

in the middle of my new town,

perched on that little hill,

overlooking all I own.

[Enter wood spirits, Exit Erisychthon, Mestra in shadow]

Erysichthon's Axe

My axe waits for the oak,

its fat shadow on the field,

its point growing

on the blue and clouds

and the tinkling glitter

of its swaying ornaments:

what crosses me and mine

I will take out

under this same discriminating tree

you fear, which spreads,

year on year,

across my forecast growth.

No one gets to sit this out,

all are part of my big picture,

what I’ll hang

on my word. Here

is the strong trunk and branch

of my nights and years,

this gleam I’ll take

to the obscure hours

which filter light

and baffle sound:

what presides over us

will end with this sharp question

making its impossible offer.

Mestra's Lament

Where’s the tree I hid under,

branches robins warned me thinly from

when he’d seek me out, my father?

Who will bring him to his senses?

In this massacre of branches,

where the robin once was?

The earth’s a bare drum,

clear as the horizon

his step lands heavily on

where I follow him,

through the forest’s slaughter,

my father’s daughter.