Lent Series

Curating this year’s Lent Series, focusing on death, grief and loss, has been something of a difficult experience. As i mentioned at the start of the series, this theme has felt unavoidable and inevitable at the moment, but at the same time works such as the ones i’ve featured, that…

The penultimate work in this year’s Lent Series is one that ended up having to wait over a quarter of a century from the date of composition to receive its first performance. James MacMillan completed his orchestral piece The Keening in 1987, while studying for his PhD at Durham University.…

The Arabic word ‘nakba’ (النكبة), which translates as “disaster” or “cataclysm”, is used to refer to the suffering, displacement and destruction wrought on the Palestinians from 1948 (with the wartime exodus) to the present day. It’s a term that has been in use right from the outset of the Israeli-Palestinian…

i’m turning to music that’s more abstract, though no less powerfully evocative, for the next work in this year’s Lent Series. The title of Chaya Czernowin‘s short 2018 guitar piece Black Flowers comes from a text by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: In the depths of matter there grows an obscure…

The word ‘solastalgia’ was invented in 2003 by philosopher Glenn Albrecht as a concept to describe the lived experience of negative environmental change. This indicates a variety of contexts – both actual and potential – in which one directly experiences grief and pain from the perception that one’s sense of…

The next work i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series is one that, in the six years since i first heard it, has completely changed my opinion about it. At the world première of John Woolrich’s Swan Song, i felt that “the fragmented delivery of transient moments of something cantabile…

The next piece i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series, focusing on grief and loss, is probably the shortest i’ve ever explored on 5:4. Naomi Pinnock’s We are consists of a mere 12 bars of music, lasting around 60 seconds. The piece was part of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Postcards from…

The next piece in my Lent Series is concerned with not just the possibility but the occasional necessity of having to progress through darkness. Some Paths Will Always Lead Through the Shadows was composed by Elis Hallik in 2021, and takes as inspiration words by poet Doris Kareva: Bitter and…

The Lent Series continues today with a short, darkly ruminative work for baritone and ensemble by British composer Colin Matthews. It’s a setting of the poem ‘It rains’ by war poet Edward Thomas, one of two poems that Thomas composed in 1917 concerned with rain. ‘It rains’ is a wistful…

For the next work in this year’s 5:4 Lent Series, i’m turning to a work for oboe and three organs by Estonian composer Lauri Jõeleht. A Prayer in Darkness dates from 2017, and its title is drawn from an eponymous poem by G. K. Chesterton, the final verse of which…

For the next work in this year’s Lent Series, i’m turning to the uniquely haunting melancholy sound of the brass band. In 2014, i wrote about Gavin Higgins‘ Three Broken Love Songs, and his more recent work Sadly Now the Throstle Sings explores the same subject matter. The title comes…

It’s Ash Wednesday, the traditional first day of Lent, so it’s time for my annual 5:4 Lent Series. Last year, i took nature as my theme as something of an antidote to the fact that, at the time, being able to travel and explore the natural world was difficult if…

To bring this year’s nature-focused Lent Series to a close, i’m turning to a major work by British composer Laura Bowler. Antarctica is a 50-minute multimedia piece for voice and orchestra that constitutes a very personal, and very passionate, response to a variety of issues affecting the natural world. As…

When choosing the theme of nature for this year’s Lent Series, one of the first works i knew i wanted to include was Histoires Naturelles, a collaboration for voice and electronics by Ute Wassermann and Richard Barrett. Not to be confused with Ravel’s song cycle of the same name(!), the…

For the next work in this year’s nature-themed Lent Series i’m turning to not so much a fully-fleshed, self-contained composition, but something of a miniature curiosity, an outtake saved from the cutting-room floor that’s subsequently been restored. Olivier Messiaen‘s final orchestral work, Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà…, completed in 1991, was a…

One of the composers i’ve become most fascinated by in recent years is Mirjam Tally. Born in Estonia, but for many years based in Sweden, Tally’s work often draws on elements of folk music and is invariably imbued with allusions to the natural world. This attraction to nature extends throughout…

My nature-themed Lent Series finally gets to explore the night in La Leggiadra Luna by Albanian composer Thomas Simaku. A choral work composed in 2017, its text is an Italian translation (by Salvatore Quasimodo) of a fragment by the Greek poet Sappho. The words articulate a short reverie marvelling at the…

In The Thin Tree (discussed in my last post), Klaus Lang abstracts ideas, patterns and concepts from nature, and creates a soundworld that develops and grows from an opening 4-note idea. Korean composer Unsuk Chin‘s 2019 orchestral work SPIRA – Concerto for Orchestra does something similar, also being concerned with “the…

For me the basic idea how to translate from one field of art into another is not to imitate the surface (like programme music) but to find underlying abstract principles and give them an acoustic representation. These words of Klaus Lang (from a lecture he gave titled ‘Boston Beauties’) refers…

For the next work in this year’s nature-inspired Lent Series, i’m returning to the world of birds. Japanese composer Akira Nishimura‘s 1993 orchestral work Bird Heterophony takes its inspiration, in part at least, from a folk tale from Papua New Guinea, in which a young woman witnesses her brother transformed…