The Carice Singers

George Parris conductor

A Prayer of Peace and Light

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)                                                            A Prayer to the Father of Heaven 6’

Galina Grigorjeva (b.1962)                                                                             ‘O gladsome light’ from Vespers 5’

Arvo Pärt (b.1935)                                                                                            Nunc Dimittis 7’

Valentyn Silvestrov (b.1937)                                                                           A Prayer for the Ukraine 5’

György Ligeti (1923-2006)                                                                             Lux aeterna 10’

Soosan Lolavar (b.1987)                                                                                  The World is the Active String (world premiere) 8’

Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012)                                                                        Plainsongs for Peace and Light 7’

William Byrd (c.1540-1623)                                                                            O lux Beata Trinitas 4’

This event is kindly supported by Diana Woolley.

Soosan Lolavar’s The World is the Active String is commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society as part of its 2023 Composers programme.

Light moves faster than sound, and however much it aspires to the condition of light, music always has its roots in its own time and place. “O radiant luminary of light interminable, Celestial Father…” begins the poem by John Skelton that Ralph Vaughan Williams composed as his Prayer to the Father of Heaven in 1948: a professed agnostic turning to a sacred text – and vision – during the darkest decade in human history. 

This concert is punctuated with pieces – whether Arvo Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis (composed in 2001 by an artist who had chafed against state-enforced  atheism), or György Ligeti’s Lux aeterna (written in 1966 by another refugee from communism, and later raised to cult status by its appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) – in which composers confront and transcend their era by appealing to a greater light, in music of luminous, life-affirming beauty. The Urkrainian-Estonian composer Galina Grigorjeva’s lucid, spacious choral music has been described as combining Eastern and Western influences – from Renaissance motets to the ancient traditions of Orthodox liturgy. The result (as always, when a composer has something truly worthwhile to say) is wholly individual. Her Vespers were premiered in 2017.

For at least one of the composers here, the task has taken on a new and tragic urgency. The message of A Prayer for the Ukraine (composed during an earlier tragedy in 2014) by Ukraine’s most respected living composer Valentyn Silvestrov is self-evident. According to Soosan Lolovar, meanwhile, her new choral work The World is the Active String:

…explores the complex resonances produced when physically and aesthetically separate materials overlap in unexpected ways. In this work, sound moves amongst spatialised singers onstage, and between onstage and offstage groups. At the same time, a repeating two-chord refrain overlaps with a series of solos and duets exploring tiny microtimbral inflections in sound. The assemblage of these materials creates an environment which evokes the primordial, gesturing to a soundworld that originates in the earth and which echoes continuously through time. This piece encourages listeners to consider human participants as sympathetic strings that allow us to momentarily tune in to the ongoing resonances of the world around us.

Infinity – in both sound and light – was certainly in the minds of the two composers who conclude this concert. In his very last completed work, the late Jonathan Harvey vaulted time and space to create pure beauty: it’s no coincidence that in order to do this, his Plainsongs for Peace and Light (2012) draw on plainsong melodies (and spiritual ideas) that predate the western classical tradition. For William Byrd, a Catholic in an age of repression and religious turmoil, the light of the Holy Trinity, as described in his setting of St Ambrose’s hymn O lux Beata Trinitas (1575), was a source of comfort and strength at a time when his co-religionists were forced to worship by the secrecy of candlelight. Here, again, music provides the absent light of day: the joyous radiance of this music from a dark time is as consoling now as it was then – nearly 450 years ago. 

Richard Bratby

The Carice Singers is fast emerging as one of the most distinctive vocal ensembles in the UK, defined by its unique sound and imaginative choice of repertoire. Created in the North Cotswolds in 2011 and naming itself after Elgar’s only child, the choir has put his legacy – and particularly his fresh, poetic but unduly neglected music for unaccompanied vocal ensembles – at the heart of its twelve-year musical life.

Full of adventure and imagination, the group is committed to promoting curiosity and appreciation not only for this music but for an ever-widening repertoire amongst people of all ages.

The Carice Singers has witnessed a particularly busy post-pandemic renaissance performing at, among others, Cheltenham Music Festival, Chiltern Arts Festival, Kings Place, Lichfield Festival, Ludlow English Song Weekend, Spitalfields Music Festival and the Three Choirs Festival. 2023 began with a debut concert at London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, and will continue with concerts marking György Ligeti’s 100th anniversary and an appearance in the Joy & Devotion Festival of Polish Sacred Music in London on 10 November. 

Soprano

Isabella Gibber

Sarah Keating

Hannah King

Ellie Sperling

Alto

Annely Leinberg

Sophie Overin

Anna Semple

Joy Sutcliffe

Tenor

Paul Bentley-Angell

Tom Perkins 

Jonathan Hanley

Sebastian Hill

Bass

David Le Prevost

Freddie Crowley

Henry Saywell

Jonty War

George Parris grew up in South Warwickshire and at the age of 18 was awarded the Elgar Society’s Certificate of Merit for initiating an Elgar Festival at his school. He has degrees in Music from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and studied Conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki between 2017 and 2020.. Together with his role as Artistic Director of The Carice Singers, he directs the award-winning Finnish choir Spira Ensemble and is Co-Artistic Director of the Aurore Renaissance Music Festival in Helsinki. As a singer he has performed many contemporary choral works with the Helsinki Chamber Choir and has appeared as a soloist alongside the Helsinki and Finnish Baroque Orchestras. He has also been invited to conduct the Croatian Radio Television Choir, Coro Casa da Música in Portugal, and Finland’s Key Ensemble, and is currently one 

of Ex Cathedra’s Associate Conductors.

Dr Soosan Lolavar is a British-Iranian composer whose music draws on ideas from both western and Iranian traditions. Her music has been performed across the world, broadcast on BBC television in both the UK and Iran and played on BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service. In 2022 she won the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Composer prize and was partnered with Cheltenham Music Festival. In 2023 she was selected as one of six composers to be submitted by the British delegation to the International Society for Contemporary Music International Jury for consideration as part of the 2023 World Music Days Festival in South Africa. 

She often devises unique tuning systems for her work with the help of the infinite capabilities of the santoor (Iranian hammered dulcimer). She strives to make music which sounds like it continues to resonate in the world long after we have stopped listening.