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lluminare

CAROLS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM

Illuminare is a new Christmas album featuring Christmas carols composed by no-less than 20 contemporary composers, including 14 world premiere recordings and 6 BBC commissions. The list includes a veritable 'who's who' of the contemporary music scene, amongs them James Macmillan, Thomas Ades, John Tavener, Richard Rodney Bennett, John Harle and Steve Martland.

Michael Stewart caught up with Roxanna Panufnik, Howard Goodall and John Harle to ask how they approached the commissions for this enterprising new album.


Roxanna Panufnik

Sleep, little Jesus, sleep

"Basically it's a bit of a cheat as it's not an original carol but an arrangement of a traditional Polish Carol, a lullaby carol like our Away in a Manger, so I had to be very careful about how I was going to do this because I did not want to offend any senses, and obviously it's a dearly loved carol. I had a wonderful translation done by a Polish friend of mine called Anna Kaspszyk, I love the Polish title of the carol - Lulaj, lulajze Jezniu - they are such beautiful onamatpaic words that I really wanted to use them in this version, so the choir sing them in Polish at certain points and accompany the soloist. It's dedicated to my God-daughter Zerlina, because I did several of these polish carol arrangements and they are all dedicated to my God-children. While we were recording the carol it was very sweet, because it says on the top of the score For Zerlina and the soloist on the CD said who's Zerlina? and I told her, so she said "tell Zerlina I'm singing it specially for her" which was a really lovely thing to do.

Polish Carols are just fabulous. They really have some stunning ones and I would really love be more pro-active in getting them better known in this country. I have just had four arrangements published by Universal Edition called Angels Sing for upper voices, which also come with orchestral accompaniment, and so hopefully that will go towards getting them better known in the country, but I would also love to do a series of arrangements of carols from all over the world, and maybe one day that will be a possibility".


Howard Goodall

Romance of the Angels


"If you're a composer living in the year 2000 you can't pretend that most the of the potential texts for carols have all been done to death, and whilst that does'nt make them any less good it does mean that the possibilities are a little limited. So when I'm asked to do a new carol the first thing I think is how can I come to this in a fresh way. One of the things I feel about carols is, and I'm as guilty as the next person, is that most carols are a bit dreamy and moodily atmospheric and even melancholic, so when a composer sits down to write a carol that is pretty much the first thing that comes into your head - they remind you of your childhood, with a nostalgic if not even sentimental feel about them. So I think you're liberated if you go to a text in a different language and of course the Latin American feel to the Romance of Angels is of course stimulated by the Spanish text. It's reasonably difficult to sing I think. But immediately I saw the Spanish text felt the rhythm starting to course through my veins and it suggested to me an 'up tempo' jolly thing with a latin rhythm. The other problem of course is that if you're a sort of pastoral English composer, and I suppose I would fall into that lyrical category, you're only going to end writing Peter Warlock all over again, so the only way for me to get right out of that mind-set of King's College on the 24th December, is to say right let's start again and go in from a different angle".


John Harle

Mrs Beeton's Christmas Pudding

"Well, I was starting work on the music for the televison series A History of Britain and was incredibly busy when, at the same time Michael, who I knew from the BBC Singers, rang me and said how about writing me a Christmas Carol for our album. I was actually doubtful that I would have the time or the spare creative juices to do this so I said look Michael I'm virtually certain that I can't do this because I'm so pushed, but he said well give it a bit of time and see if you can come with something that you can easily to do. Then I was on the telephone one evening to a writer called Charlotte Cory and she said that she had always wanted to set the recipe to Mrs Beeton's Christmas Pudding, and it seemed to me to be exactly the sort of little novelty that would go down well on an otherwise quite a highbrow disc. I then rang Michael to say that we had got a good idea but it's going to be pretty different to everything else on the disc, and he was actually more than happy about that, but I wasn't expecting him to be because otherwise it's really a rather grand disc.


So we thought, OK, if we are going to set Mrs Beeton then let's look at the period of Mrs Beeton, let's look at the old BBC and the old ribbon microphone and 'Uncle Mac', and of course the musical genre we came up with was Barber Shop. After that it became quite an easy job because after settling into the genre, listening to a few records and thinking about how one might adapt to the rhythm of Charlotte's words it became a science as much as an art and it was really quite quick to do - I wrote it in about a day.


Then of course the idea of spoken interjections seemed a good idea, and thinking back to the 'Uncle Mac' programmes on the BBC it seemed a good idea to get some old English voices, so we got Eleanor Bron, who's one of my favourite actresses of all time, and Charles Collingwood who plays Brian Aldridge in The Archers, both whom I have known for a long time, and recorded the spoken word elements. There was a certain degree of improvisation in that session because we knew that it could quite funny and wild - and it was - and they performed amazingly well. We then had to take away all that recorded material and treat it so that we could add some crackly old '78 sounds and the scratching of the needle and other novelty sounds. It's now become quite popular and people want to use it on BBC Radio 1 and 2 so it's got quite an interesting life beyond the album now".


Interviews: © Michael Stewart 2000