Performed by Rob Buckland (alto sax) and Fiachra Garvey (piano) at the 2016 CASSGB Gala Concert.

'Nocturne' for Alto Saxophone and Piano

Performed by Ellipsis and Katie Bray at the 2022 Opera Cameratina Festival in Oborne, Dorset. Text by Ivan Turgenev translated by Constance Garnett.

'Enough' for Mezzo-soprano, Piano, Flute and Oboe

Performed by Sam Furness (tenor) and Lilly Vadaneaux (piano). Text by Ezra Pound.

'Song of The Bowmen of Shu' for Tenor and Piano

Performed in Clare College Chapel, Cambridge, by students Jacqueline Seki, Daphne Delfas, Alma Vink and Zak El-Shirbiny.

This piece is a response to the second part of T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), the only section told from the first person singular rather than first person plural. It seems to mark a turning inwards after the first part of the poem, reflected by the solo cello melody at the beginning. This string quartet movement explores the contrast between humanity and its opposite, an important theme throughout the poem. A motif passed between the two violins represents glimpses of human tenderness, contrasted with sections of bare fifths at the extremes of the quartet’s register, representing hollowness. The climax of the piece highlights the tension between violence and fragility in the poem, and everything after this point is a ghostly, fragmented memory of what came before.

'Eyes I dare not meet in dreams' for String Quartet

It will not always be like this,
The air windless, a few last
Leaves adding their decoration
To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening
In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up
From the day’s chores, pause a minute,
Let the mind take its photograph
Of the bright scene, something to wear
Against the heart in the long cold.

Text by R.S. Thomas 
© Elodie Thomas



When I came across this poem by R.S. Thomas, I was drawn to the ambiguity of ‘the long cold’ and the way autumn is presented as a liminal space between the known and the unknown. I wanted to explore the multiple possible layers of meaning for autumn that arise from this ambiguity, encompassing memory and the passage of time. The piece, intimately scored for solo soprano, is quite introspective. Though the poem carefully avoids the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’, we still feel as if we are viewing the scene through the eyes of an individual, in a still moment in time.

'A Day in Autumn' for Solo Soprano

Lilly is a composer, pianist and singer based in London. She studied music at Clare College Cambridge and attended the Junior Guildhall School of Music from 2011 to 2021, where she studied composition with Paul Whitmarsh and Jeffery Wilson. She has also received mentoring from composer Roxanna Panufnik. Lilly was a winner of the NCEM Young Composers Award in 2013 and 2018 and the CASSGB Saxophone Composition Competition in 2016. She was also highly commended in the 2016 and 2019 BBC Young Composer Competition. Lilly has been commissioned to write new works for the West Wicklow Festival (2019), Opera Cameratina Festival (2022) and Electric Voice Theatre (2023).

Lilly Vadaneaux

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