2 mins
Gently does it
Voice and strings combine for a poetic lullaby
CHAMBER PLAY: Members of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra perform in DSCH, a ‘visual concert’ based on the life and works of Dmitri Shostakovich. The musicians performed works including chamber music, film music and his Chamber Symphony in costume, with choreographed movement and visual backdrops. NCO artistic director Pekka Kuusisto described the concert as ‘one possible vision of what an orchestra could be in 2023 – not only playing at the highest possible level, but completely redesigning the performance situation’. The concert will be reviewed in the next issue of The Strad. Photo: Magnus Skrede
COMPOSER Roxanna Panufnik
WORK Floral Tribute
ARTIST Voces8, Carducci Quartet
DATE 9 August 2023
PLACE Royal Albert Hall, London, UK bitly.ws/Jp3x
meant to soothe,’ says British composer Roxanna Panufnik about Floral Tribute, her new work for string ‘ I t’s quartet and eight-person choir. ‘It will be performed at a late-night Prom called “Mindful Mix”, so it’s meant to be calming.’ The five-minute piece is based on Simon Armitage’s 2022 poem of that name, written following the death and in commemoration of Queen Elizabeth II. ‘The warmth and gentleness of the poem immediately conjured up a sort of lullaby,’ says Panufnik. ‘So it was wonderful to have the string quartet creating a gentle rocking motion alongside the choir.’
The piece, which has two verses and is strophic, makes use of the poem’s acrostic nature, with the first letter of every line spelling ‘Elizabeth’. The melody, which was composed with the natural pitch and rhythm of the words in mind, is passed around the voices. The other parts accompany by emphasising the first letter of each line; for example in the first line they stretch out the E’s in ‘evening’, ‘ever’, and so on. About the voice and string combination, Panufnik explains: ‘They’re very much together. The quartet underpins the rich harmonies, but there are also moments where one of the instruments floats up and shines.
Roxanna Panufnik
Carducci Quartet
PANUFNIK PHOTO BENAMIN EALOVEGA. CARDUCCI PHOTO PATRICK ALLEN
‘Strings are so close to the human voice that it wasn’t at all hard to imagine how they would fit together with the choir,’ she continues. About the performers – Voces8 and the Carducci Quartet – Panufnik says: ‘The lovely thing is that both groups have an incredibly warm sound, like a blanket, and beautifully blended. I’m really looking forward to hearing it in the Royal Albert Hall and seeing whether the soothing harmonies will work in that enormous space.’