Article published in Manchester Evening News 10 April 2015

MANCHESTER’S top two orchestras have major world premieres by British composers on consecutive days at the Bridgewater Hall. 

First is the Hallé, with A Celestial Map Of The Sky, by Tarik O’Regan, a 15-minute work commissioned by Manchester Grammar School to mark its quincentenary (and featuring the MGS Choir alongside the Hallé Youth Choir). That’s on April 16, conducted by Sir Mark Elder.  

The following night H K Gruber conducts the BBC Philharmonic in the 25-minute eighth symphony of David Matthews, a BBC commission (the world premiere of Matthews’ seventh symphony was part of the Mahler celebration here five years ago). 

Tarik’s a composer and former percussionist with two Grammy nominations and two British Composer Awards already. He tells me it was a visit to MGS that set his mind on the theme that sparked his imagination. “I was looking around the library and saw a very early tome: Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament. 

“I’d been reading about the 16^th century humanist principles behind the founding of the school, and I saw a connection between that and the print by Albrecht Dürer which gives the piece its title. He shows the night sky of the northern hemisphere, framed by images of real astronomers – not gods or allegorical figures, so the idea is that real people framed our understanding of the universe.” 

The work takes texts from Whitman, Hopkins, Bourdillon and Mahmood Jamal, including Whitman’s ‘I see the cities of the earth …’ – one is Manchester. 

David Matthews says he didn’t expect to write another symphony, having created a symphonic poem for his last commission from the Philharmonic (played at the BBC Proms in 2013). “But I overcame my reluctance and decided to do one. It’s quite different from the seventh, which was in one movement. 

“This has three, very contrasted. The second movement is slow, and the third fast.” The first, he explains in a programme note, starts slowish but becomes a concise quick movement. 

The finale is light-hearted, in four dance sections, each just over a minute long. It has melodic ideas which, David says, ‘some might think naïve’, but he adds: “I might be criticized for writing unaffectedly happy music, which it is, but I think that if contemporary classical music is to have any chance of connecting with people today, it has to have something they can recognise and relate to … and that, mainly, is melody.”