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Details
Jacqueline du Pré Music Building
St Hilda's College
Cowley Place
Oxford
OX4 1DY
England
Programme
Helen Charlston – Isolation Songbook
Performers
Helen Charlston – mezzo-soprano
Michael Craddock – baritone
Alexander Soares – piano
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
Song Futures is Oxford Lieder’s programme to perform and commission new music. This year we have a dedicated series of eight late-night Song Futures concerts, Tuesdays to Fridays in both weeks of the Festival. They are by no means the only performances of music by living composers in the Festival, nor are they exclusively contemporary music in all cases, but new music is their strong focus.
Tonight, for the first of these, we hear the Isolation Songbook. This songbook for the modern world was commissioned and curated by Helen Charlston (who has recently become a BBC New Generation Artist) during 2020, when she invited 15 composers to respond to their experiences of lockdown. Since then the Songbook has been recorded and widely acclaimed for its rich and inspiring variety. Tonight, we hear 12 of these existing works and add one more, specially commissioned by Oxford Lieder from the brilliant young composer Alex Ho.
Helen Charlston writes:
"To be a musician is to be a social creature. We need each other to express, connect and make music. As the UK went into lockdown at the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, those avenues of connection were torn away from us. We were told to stay in our homes and wait. The Isolation Songbook is a collaborative outcome of this period: without normal outlets for creative expression, I sought a new way of making music and connecting with artists. Through an open call for scores I reached 4 poets and 15 composers looking for that impetus to turn their creativity into something tangible. It has been an extraordinary privilege to be invited into the composers’ and poets’ own experience through these songswhich are by turns witty and melancholic, brash and joyful.
Tonight, we perform selections of the 15 songs that make up the Isolation Songbook, alongside a new addition to the set: Alex Ho’s two connected souls. When Sholto approached me about the idea of adding to the songbook with an Oxford Lieder Commission it seemed like the perfect way to mark the time that has passed since these songs were first written. Alex and I both felt that we wanted to zoom in on a particular Oxford experience of and recovery from lockdown. Kwan-Ann Tan’s text encapsulates this perfectly, tracing the realities of distance and connection as restrictions changed.
The songs in the Isolation Songbook have had the unique experience of being created in a time in which they could not be shared with a live audience. We have given performances online, and recorded the set on Delphian Records, but for many of the songs we will perform this evening you are the first audience to sit in the same physical space with them. Thank you for being a part of this next stage of life for these songs. Art, love, joy, and friendship are all around us: in the everyday as well as in celebration and loss. That is what I hope we have captured here."
Enjoy the whole festival live online for £165 with a Digital Festival Pass. All events will be available on demand after broadcast until 30th November, so you can catch up at a time which suits you.
