Ruth Byrchmore
The productive partnership between The Sixteen and the Genesis Foundation continued in May 2011 with the release of a CD of six new choral works from three of Britain’s most exciting contemporary composers: Ruth Byrchmore, Tarik O’Regan and Roderick Williams.
Ruth Byrchmore’s setting of The Dark Night opens with a dramatic organ prelude, its mood suggestive of fiery inner conflict, and composed with the magnificent sound of the Westminster Cathedral organ in mind. Over a steady bass line which preserves, the composer says, ‘a feeling of stasis’, the sopranos launch sublimely with a lithe rising pattern which the organ decorates with short flutters, like piquant arabesques, engendering ‘a kind of dance between the voices and accompaniment.’ Below, lower voices introduce a recurrent falling semiquaver motif, soon taken up by all: this creates a jostling, excitable forward momentum, resumed more calmly, even hypnotisingly, after a forceful organ interlude.
At ‘O guiding night’ comes a magical change: the choir embarks on a seraphic chorale, until the accompaniment, now becalmed, lures the voices into an exquisite, lilting canon. The organ terrifyingly harks back to the start, and initiates a massive declamatory passage for the choir (‘I abandoned and forgot myself ’).
Finally the choir’s gorgeous opening music returns: a hint, as the composer remarks, that ‘this may be not the end, but rather the beginning of a recurring cycle that goes on forever.’
To learn more about this project, please visit The Sixteen’s partner page.
