Seasons and Charms is a collection of short pieces for young people's voices and piano commissioned by Aldeburgh Music for the Friday Afternoons Project.Inspired by Benjamin Britten Friday Afternoons is an initiative created by Snape Maltings (formerly Aldeburgh Music) to open up a world of singing for children and young people.
SKU: PE.EP72666A
ISBN 9790577009865. 210 x 297mm inches. English.
Jointly commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic and Festival Aix-en-Provence, 'The Monster in the Maze' was composed by Jonathan Dove to a libretto by Alasdair Middleton, with German and French translations by Arne Muus ('Was lauert da im Labyrinth?') and Alain Perroux ('Le Monstre du labyrinthe') respectively. The piece is scored for three professional soloists and a professional actor, adult community chorus, youth chorus, children's chorus, and an orchestra of professional players playing alongside young or pre-professional players. Edition Peters vocal score of the English language version.
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.
