REMAINS of ELMET
concerto for viola-vocalist, voices and instruments (2013)
in six parts
based on the poetry collection by Ted Hughes
a music-theatre collaboration with Victoria Bernath
commissioned as recipients of the Terry Holmes Composer/Performer Award 2012/13
for the York Spring Festival of New Music 2013
Watch the full premiere performance here.
I – Moors
II – Remains of Elmet [from 10’28”]
III – A Tree [16’17”]
IV – Telegraph Wires [20’52”]
V – Light Falls Through Itself [22’09”]
VI – The Word that Space Breathes [23’33”]
Premiered by Victoria Bernath
The 24 choir
University of York Chamber Orchestra
Conductor: Jonathan Brigg
Rehearsal conductors: Jonathan Brigg and James Whittle
York Spring Festival of New Music 2013
8th May 2013
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York
Film edited by Christopher Leedham
A review of the concert by York Press’s Steve Crowther can be read here.
Text from ‘Remains of Elmet’ and ‘Elmet’ used with kind permission by The Ted Hughes Estate, with thanks to Faber & Faber Ltd.
Short Programme Note
The upturned face of this land
The mad singing in the hills
The prophetic mouth of the rain.
Ted Hughes’s Remains of Elmet, ‘A Pennine Sequence’ (1979), is a poetry collection inspired by photographs by Fay Godwin of the West Yorkshire landscape of his childhood. Together, the poems and photographs address themes of decay and regeneration: social, physical, and psychological. Setting five poems from the collection, this work gives a theatrical twist to the traditional concerto form. Unconducted, a resonance chamber of wordless voices and a staged block of instrumentalists challenge the dual nature of the mercurial soloist: a viola-vocalist who traces a fragile path through the work’s cyclical development.
The light, opening younger, fresher wings
Holds this land up again like an offering
Heavy with the dream of a people.