6-11 July 2025, Skipton, UK
Repertoire from The Baldwin Partbooks. Composers include Sheppard, White, Mundy, Tallis, Byrd and Parsons.
Author: Bill
Saturday 5 July 2025, 7.30pm, St Saviour’s Church, St Albans AL1 4DF. Tickets.
Walton – Portsmouth Point Overture
Grieg – Piano Concerto with soloist Gabrielė Bekerytė
Shostakovich – Symphony 10
Saturday 7 June 2025, 7.45pm, Princes Hall, Aldershot, GU11 1NX. Featuring Fleet Choral Society. Tickets.
Fauré, Cantique de Jean Racine
Chilcott, The Snow is Fled
Beethoven, Meeresstille und glückliche fahrt
Prokofiev, Violin Concerto no. 2
Violin – So-Ock Kim
INTERVAL
Beethoven, Symphony no. 9
Soprano – Juliana Cook; Mezzo – Judith Le Breuilly; Tenor – Andrew Woodmansey; Bass – Patrick Keefe
Judge. How to apply.
Norfolk Pilgrimage 4-11 May 2025
Performances in St Peter Mancroft, Wymondham Abbey, Walsingham Shrine Church and Binham Priory. Repertoire including del Encina, Guerrero, Victoria, Lobo, Padilla, Morales, Byrd and Charlotte Bray.
Poetry
Ten years ago I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Truthfully, Kilimanjaro is not a climb: it’s a very long walk! But its altitude (5895m) is a serious issue, and the thin air at the top is a challenge for anyone.
Not for ravens! The ravens on Kilimanmjaro are white-necked ravens; and like all ravens they are master aeronauts.
Right now, I’m reading Walter Bonatti’s The Mountains of my Life, in the fabulous translation by Robert Marshall. Bonatti recounts his first ascent of the north face of the Grandes Jorasses (a true climb!) with Cosimo Zappelli in 1963. They are high up a sheer ice slope when they encounter a crow – see below.
Meanwhile, here is the poem, Circus.
Toward evening I thought I heard the croak of a crow. I wanted to believe it, but it seemed improbable in this inhuman place. But the crow was really there and indeed it even seemed to take pleasure in our company. Black and furtive, it sailed lyrically on the rising currents of the wind. With searing lashes of its wings and hissing dives and zooms, it first abandoned and then resumed its riding on the currents of the air, sporting with poetic abandon. At times it was suspended in the blue, motionless as if clinging to the sky, and then suddenly it would describe parabolas, coils, and spirals of extraordinary elegance. It’s shrieked every so often, with a harsh, sonorous cry, and in the silence that followed, it seemed to enjoy its cries echoing in the empty sky. At times it grazed me at an acute angle as it swept along the outlines of the wall; but more often its shape appeared fleetingly and piratically against the whiteness of the glaciers, or etched superbly against the blue dome of the sky. They say the crow is a bird of ill omen, but I don’t believe it. In a place like that, to meet its presence was infinitely friendly.
Bonatti, Walter (transl. Marshall, Robert). The Mountains of My Life. London: Penguin Books, 2010
January-March 2025
I’m working on a string quartet, Op. 9, and finalising plans for the summer expedition (Faroes, Iceland, Lofoten) for The Sea of Trees project.
Jobs at Ballynamona include: stripping the internal walls and planting the garden.
Guild of Ships continues to thrive. We are delighted to welcome Fred Hartgroves to the team, making us a team of six.
Commissioned by Mishmash Productions for their fantastic touring show, Strange Creatures. The piece, Grumpy Trio, is performed using just vocal sounds and body percussion. It features in a podcast presented by Charlotte Fairbairn, performed by Charlotte Fairbairn, Flora Curzon and Sophie Rivlin. Grumpy Trio starts at 3’30”.
PDF perusal score free. Performance scores €10 per set per performance.
More Music for Screen & Stage
Lamb (Nashashibi/Skaer)
Short film by Nashashibi/Skaer with sound-track by Bill, mezzo-soprano Olivia Ray and Rosalind Nashashibi. Footage of a lambing shed from the Island of Lewis and Harris shot by Lucy Skaer….
Poetry
Singing technique is partly about the length of the out-breath. When we focus on singing ‘to the end of the line’ the voice functions naturally and the in-breath becomes a reflex. If we’re singing indoors, the building reverberates for us. We can even sense our breath and the sound-waves travelling to the walls and bouncing back. When we sing outside we miss this acoustic feedback; and solo al fresco singing can feel particularly strange! But when we imagine our song meeting the lie of the land… the length of our out-breath increases and singing becomes reciprocal again.
Orison is an old word for a prayer. Read it here.
Wednesday 1 January 2025, 7.00pm, St Albans Abbey, Sumpter Yard, AL1 1BY. ‘Music from Stage and Screen’
Williams: ET, Superman, Star Wars
E. Bernstein: The Magnificent Seven
Moross: The Big Country
Shostakovich: Romance from The Gadfly
Burgon: Brideshead Revisited
Goodwin: The Trap
Bizet: Carmen Suite No. 1
Rossini: Overture – Barber of Seville
Sullivan, arr. Mackerras: Pineapple Poll
Rogers and Hammerstein: Overtures – South Pacific and Oklahoma
Tickets here.
New choral work written during Storm Darragh
Storms Bert, Darragh and Eowyn have been and gone, leaving destruction, renewal and peace in their wake.
3 mins. SATB with some div. PDF perusal score €10
Unaccompanied SATB with some divisi
Duration: 3’
PDF perusal score: €10.
Storms Bert, Darragh and Eowyn have been and gone, leaving destruction, renewal and peace in their wake.
I happened to be finishing this work at night, while Storm Darragh was terror, and my faith was that the ash wouldn’t give in to die-back and rubble the house. As it was, it swayed and held and it was the beech that cleaved (see picture). But, come Storm Eowyn, which was hurricane force, the main branches of the ash had to be cut back in advance, leaving a huge denuded trunk.
Somehow, amidst this, the animals shift, align and sleep. The piece features the call of one my local blackbirds, and that soft talk that blackbirds do when they’re not singing for wide spaces. The title is a grateful nod to Norah McGuinness’ painting, ‘The Startled Bird’, in the National Gallery, Ireland, which also features a blackbird.
More Fieldwork Pieces
Icicle
Part of the project, ‘The Singing Glacier’. For violin, viola and glockenspiel.
The Singing Glacier
For baroque ensemble. Collaborative response to glaciers, commissioned by The Little Baroque Company. In 2016 Bill and the poet Helen Mort climbed in East Greenland.
Mountain Hare
Finzi Scholarship piece inspired by Mountain Hares in the Cairngorms. Classical orchestra version (2,2,2,2; 4,2,0,0; timp; strings) and potential chamber version (violin, cello, piano, clarinet). Bill also wrote a travel…
Guild of Ships is now a Ltd Company, registered in Ireland
We’re delighted that Guild of Ships is now incorporated as a Limited Company, registered in Ireland. GOS is a bookings and circular economy platform for traditional sail travel. After a successful two-day conference in Helsinki in November, we are raring to go, with new app functions and designs, and new partnerships to be announced shortly.
Saturday 16 November 2024, Princes Hall, Aldershot, GU11 1NX
Soloist: Mimi Doulton (Soprano)
Tchaikovsky – Fantasy Overture ‘Romeo and Juliet‘
Lutosławski – Silesian Triptych
Lutosławski – Lacrimosa
Shostakovich – Symphony No. 5
Thrilled to be working with Mimi Doulton on these fabulous Lutosławski scores. Lacrimosa was written as a graduation piece in his 20s in 1937; and it was played at his funeral in 1994. It’s simultaneously radiantly beautiful and powerful – climaxing with the soprano soloist imploring God for peace (‘Requiem’) at full volume above a sumptuous orchestra chord. He composed Silesian Triptych in 1951 within the strictures of Soviet-imposed socialist realism. He rises above all restraints with these stunning versions of Silesian folk songs that return again and again to the heart. Tickets and further details here.
Saturday 9 November 2024, 2pm and 3.30pm, St Paul’s Church AL1 4JP. Family Concert: ‘Adventures Outdoors’
Extracts from:
Ravel – Ma mère l’oye (‘Mother Goose’) Suite
Bizet – L’ Arlesienne Suite no. 2
Beethoven – Symphony No. 6
Moberg – ‘Sunrise’ from Sunrise Orchestral Suite
Kristen Anderson-Lopez, arr. Krogstad – Music from ‘Frozen‘
Adults £8, accompanied children £2. Details here.
For orchestra, ‘Echo Band’, solo marimba, solo timpani
Duration: 17’
Perusal score free by arrangement.
Commissioned by the Harry Woolhouse Charitable Trust for the 25th anniversary of Imperial College Sinfonietta. First performance, 9 June 2024, Great Hall, Imperial College, London.
Main orchestra: 2+1,2,2,2; 2,3,3,1; 2 perc (bd, quijada, plastic milk bottles; t-t, stones, claves, quijada); str; solo marimba; solo timpani
‘Echo Band’: 2,1,2,2; 2,1,2,0; hp; 1 perc (small drum, bell, glass milk bottles, bowed cymbal)
Carrownagappul is inspired by peat bogs, and a week of fieldwork in July 2023 at Carrownagappul raised bog, Mountbellew, Co. Galway. Rebecca Teesdale, Regional Manager for National Parks and Wildlife Service, East Galway, met me and gave permission for me to bivouac on the bog for the week. Maura Hannon and the team at ‘Galway’s Living Bog’ Interpretative Centre, Mountbellew, were a great help, and provided a very welcome lunch!
I collaborated with Tina Claffey, Ireland’s premier photographer of bogs, wetlands and eskers, and author of Tapestry of Light (Letterfrack, Artisan House, 2017) and Portal (Dublin, Currach, 2022). Tina joined me for a day, and helped me to focus on the beauty beneath using a magnifying glass. She also shared her stunning macro-lens images.
Peat bogs are essential. The untouched ones are some of the last true wildernesses in Europe. Bogs account for c. 3% of the earth’s land, and store twice as much carbon as its trees. They rise at the rate of about 1 mm per year. To dig down 1 metre is to retrace a thousand years. In many ways, I think of bogs as wetland glaciers. Like glaciers, they preserve artefacts and wood (including ancient instruments) in remarkable condition, the ‘bog wood’ hard, like marimba keys. They are never still, always expanding or shrinking, and even moving quickly on a massive scale. Bog surface is delicately stretched over a resonant peat mass beneath. You walk on it as if on a mighty drum (on a ‘floating’ bog you can even jump and feel the whole land move). Bogs, like mighty ears to the heart of the land, are loud
with sound. The birdsong reverberates and the wind sings.
‘Echo Band’
The Echo Band sits apart from the main orchestra, or offstage. At the premiere, it was made up of alumni players. It could be a school/college/ community orchestra. The instrumentation and parts may also be adapted: for example, the most challenging passages (e.g. bb 218-224, 254-261) may be omitted. The exception is the percussion part which must be played as written, on the instruments specified.
More Fieldwork Pieces
Icicle
Part of the project, ‘The Singing Glacier’. For violin, viola and glockenspiel.
New choral work: ‘Unstartled Bird’
Unaccompanied SATB. Written during Storm Darragh
Mountain Hare
Finzi Scholarship piece inspired by Mountain Hares in the Cairngorms. Classical orchestra version (2,2,2,2; 4,2,0,0; timp; strings) and potential chamber version (violin, cello, piano, clarinet). Bill also wrote a travel…
Saturday 12 October 2024, 7.30pm, St Paul’s Church AL1 4JP
Moberg – ‘Sunrise’ from Sunrise Orchestral Suite
Arutiunian – Trumpet Concerto, with soloist, Shannon Harper
Sibelius – Symphony No. 2
Looking forward to opening the new SASO season with Moberg’s evocative first movement from her 1909 suite. With deceptive simplicity, she conjures up the wide expanse and majesty of a Finnish sunrise. Although the score is relatively spare, the instrumentation is perfect. It builds almost to a roar of warmth and joy, with every instrument discernible throughout.
We are delighted to welcome Shannon Harper as soloist in the Arutiunian concerto. Futher concert details.
Mall Galleries, 19-28 September 2024
The Royal Society of Marine Artists returns to Mall Galleries for its annual exhibition of sea-related work.
Thrilled that RSMA is engaging so proactively in eco sail travel and trade. Delighted to attend a packed Private View on 18 September. What a pleasure to hear and meet acclaimed musicians Chris Wood and William Allen. They stood amidst the throng to play, and suddenly we were on deck…
Appointment as Artistic Director, following Tom Hammond
I’m honoured to have been appointed Artistic Director of St Alban’s Symphony Orchestra (SASO). SASO is a wonderfully warm community orchestra that performs to a high level. We collaborate with established soloists, and our leader is the superb Charlotte Fairbairn.
Sadly, SASO lost its much-loved Principal Conductor, Tom Hammond. Tom was appointed in 2016 but passed away suddenly in December 2021. We will never forget him. His dedication to music and to his colleagues and friends was extraordinary.
When the SASO committee asked me to take on the next three concerts before opening the process of finding a new conductor, I inherited Tom’s rehearsal schedule. This schedule had detailed timings for every piece, for the rest of the season. I followed it to the letter and it worked a dream. It was a testament to the incredible amount of care with which he approached his career and colleagues.
Tom was founder and Co-Artistic Director of Hertfordshire Festival of Music which launched in 2016 and has quickly become one of the main classical music festivals in the UK. He was Music Director of Hertford Symphony Orchestra and Finchley Symphony Orchestra, and was very busy in the UK and abroad. This was recognised when he was appointed an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in 2010, and later when London’s Sinfonia Tamesa appointed him Conductor Emeritus in 2019.
Tom also worked in the Middle East, conducting ensembles at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Palestine – including the Palestine Youth Orchestra – and adjudicating for the Palestine National Music Competition. In the UK he adjudicated for the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Oxford University, Trinity Laban Conservatoire and the Croydon Performing Arts Festival.
Alongside his practical music-making, Tom was a much-respected producer with Chiaro Audio. His work there was released on Resonus Classics, First Hand Records and the Edition Peters label.
As it happens, Tom and I shared a love of ancient walking routes in the UK and Europe, and he introduced me to the Harrow Way (or Harroway), the Stone-Age route that stretches from Devon to Dover.
Here’s to you, Tom.