Output details

Lamentations : music theatre piece for mezzo-soprano, alto flute and percussion

For mezzo soprano, alto flute and percussion. Duration 15 minutes. Commissioned by Angelica Cathariou. First performance May 4th 2012, Rymer Auditorium, York.

_Lamentations_ arose through collaboration with the singer Angelica Cathariou. Passages from the five books of Lamentations were selected and arranged to form a narrative designed to encapsulate the notion of lamentation. Many of these lines have been set by others, for example by Tallis, Victoria, Krenek, Stravinsky. Their settings however are in Latin and maintain a liturgical detachment, emotionally speaking. This setting is designed to foreground raw emotion, for example through the use of extremely quiet and introverted performance at the beginning, and by wailing at other moments, using modes of performance imported from outside the classical concert tradition. The work is also intended to be presented theatrically in a way which further draws the audience into a world of extreme suffering and sorrow. As with _Il Cor Tristo_, the movements are designed to be separated in performance and integrated into a larger musical context. At the premiere the mezzo soprano remained in constant focus, theatrically, while other material devised by flautist and percussionist and drawing on texts from Samuel Beckett, surrounded and complemented the precise drama of the Lamentations. Thus the 15 minutes of _Lamentations_ became a thread through a continuous one hour performance. Additional singers, hidden in the gloom around the audience, contributed spoken, murmured and sung improvisations, drawing from both Beckett and Lamentation texts. The notion that an audience need not be clear about which piece or which composer they are hearing is one that I have pursued in a number of music theatre contexts, in an attempt to subvert the formal expectations of piece, applause, acknowledgement in sequence.