Starting today

In the days leading up to our concert, Together We Sing, the author of our programme notes provides an alternative look at the pieces featured on Saturday 6^th June.  The series may be interspersed with other posts but will be more or less daily!  We hope you enjoy it.

The Gathering Tree

Commissioned by BBC for the 2025 Last Night Proms, The Gathering Tree, is, says its composer, Rachel Portman,“about who we are at our best, celebrating how we come together.”

We are the greeting, the table of welcome, home’s opening door.
And side by side, and arm in arm, with all our hearts in kindness joined,
If we hear a cry in the darkness we answer: We are here, …

Portman began her composing career writing music for BBC and Channel 4 films such as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit before going on to become the first women to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Emma having previously been nominated for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat. 

“Nick Drake’s words”, she says, “speak to what we share and what we hold dear.  I set out to write a work that communicates the shared feeling of singing together sum of our lives’ stories. I imagined a work that begins simply and then lifts and gathers-up as it progresses, and something that people could sing together in community gatherings and on occasions such as the Last Night of The Proms.“

Each verse rises up into the repeated chorus of “we are the source, the stream and the river”, where we gather to sing as one:

We are the source, the stream and the river,
We are the stories we sing to the sea
We are the stories of loss, the stories of love,
Together we sing the gathering tree.

The last verse refers specifically to the Last Night of the Proms

Here at the end of summer’s enchantment,
Strangers united in harmony,
My heartbeat is yours, your heartbeat is mine,
Together we sing the gathering tree;
The tide of light lifts us up to the mystery,
Time opens our eyes, opens our eyes, and we arise….
We are the source, the stream and the river