‘These Days – The Manchester Peace Song
Cycle’, to give it its full name – was a staged song cycle about Heaton Hall
and particularly its story in wartime, performed as a special private event
last Sunday in the hall itself and getting its official world premiere last night
at the Royal Northern College of Music.
It’s remarkable example of collaboration,
as perhaps only Manchester can do it, inspired and realized by Caroline Clegg
and her Feelgood Theatre Productions company, who have a role all their own in
the present re-enlivening of the hall as a piece of our city’s heritage.
There are nine composers (all women), and
the texts are nearly all by Tony Walsh. The performers included children from
Cheetwood Community Primary School and the Hallé Youth Training Choir, with
soprano Jenny Carson, tenor Christopher Littlewood and Joseph Jordan as actor
and sometime narrator, and a five-piece instrumental ensemble.
It was presented with some superbly
researched visual imagery projected above the performance space, and with actor
and musicians all in costume and the children’s choirs – excellently prepared
and directed, and conducted by Thomas D Hopkinson – fully using the auditorium’s
capacities, it made for an absorbing and very moving experience.
On one level it was a good piece of
story-telling, with a linking thread being the two great sculpted lions which
lie recumbent outside the back of the hall’s central block – just think what
they have seen, we’re invited to imagine as events from the past are re-enacted
before us. The children sing about them (‘You can even ride the lions if you
dare’), and they come to life near the beginning, as Amelia and Arthur, with
shaggy-collared coats and represented by the two singers. A lyric, ‘These Days’,
by Tony Walsh, recurs to bring the survey of their memories to a thoughtful
close.
I was particularly interested in the new
songs which are at its musical core. Writing songs is rarely considered the
peak of composerly skill in today’s ‘classical’ circles, though in the rest of
the universe the word ‘music’ seems to be equated almost totally with recorded song.
These miniatures showed that in Manchester at least we have some real talent
for song creation among the other skills expected of trained practitioners.
Lead composer is Nicola LeFanu, and several
of the children’s songs are her work: well judged to fit the two choruses, both
in their level of sophistication and technically, with the Hallé youngsters rising
to considerable challenges.
Ailís Ní Ríain has written a series of cello
solos which accompany narrative, there are trumpet motifs by Freya Ireland, while
Emily Howard’s music for The Malaya
Emergency, from much nearer the present and accompanying archive film, had
the unenviable task of reflecting a particularly gruesome description of
killing in combat. The other songs are by Anna Appleby, Lizzy Gür, Lucy Hale, Emily
Howard, Freya Ireeland, Grace Evangeline Mason and Carmel Smickersgill.
Lizzy Gur’s Willy Grimshaw’s ’Orn (about the public demonstration of the
gramophone by William Grimshaw in Heaton Park in 1909) was a lot of fun with
some mad ragtime in its instrumentals, and Carmel Smickersgill’s Take Me was a mock recruiting song from
the First World War part of the park’s history, full of sadness and one that
changed the atmosphere of the entire show. Freya Ireland’s The Lucky Ones (about the RAF training of the Second World War) had
a fascinating mini-ensemble sound – a lot from a little.
But the ones I found most powerful were
Lucy Hale’s Kisses, Crosses, Losses,
a slow, keening lament that continued the story of the 1914-18 tragedy, Anna
Appleby’s Disabled, an unaccompanied
setting of Wilfred Owen that formed a pivotal point in the evening, and Grace
Evangeline Mason’s Lifted, an
interlude of simple innocence that did what the title said, with eloquent
melody, as a child describes the joy of solitude and the open freedom of the
park. That was one that stayed with me.
The Manchester Peace Song Cycle - Cheetwood Community Primary School
Thank you Robert. It was so lovely to have you with us and share our new work.
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