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 6th June. The series may be interspersed with other posts but will be more or less daily! We hope you enjoy it.
Renew Me in the Sunlight
Many of those who have come to our recent Christmas concerts will be familiar with Durham-born composer and pianist Will Todd’s carol, My Lord Has Come, which has become a firm favourite with the choir.
Todd’s work ranges from choral works large and small, through opera and musical theatre to orchestral pieces, as well as jazz compositions and chamber works. His anthem, The Call of Wisdom, was performed at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations while his breakthrough work, Mass in Blue, has been performed hundreds of times all over the world and his arrangement of Amazing Grace featured at President Obama’s Inauguration Day prayer service in 2013.
Commissioned to write a piece for the Bath Camerata’s 30th anniversary in 2017, the result was Songs of Renewal, a choral suite in three movements focussing on renewal and transformation reflecting his interest in jazz.
The first movement, although ostensibly a quasi-improvisation, is, essentially, a set of variations on the words me renovare (renew me) while the central slow movement is a setting of the poem Return Again by former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, the text of which now encircles the balustrade of a new lightwell in the open space to the north of St Martin-in-the-Fields in polished stainless steel.
Fare well. Return. Fare well. Return again.
Here home and elsewhere share one mystery.
Here love and conscience sing the same refrain.
Here time leaps up. And strikes eternity.
In the last movement, Renew Me in the Sunlight, which will feature in our June concert, nature’s renewal is paralleled with that of human spiritual transformation so that:
Renew me in the sunlight …
Renew me in the blossom tree …
Transform me. Let me bring light.
becomes:
Renew me in hoping …
Renew me in comforting …
Transform me. Let me bring light.
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