Erykah Badu - On & On [Cleopatra flip]

Premiered by the Fidelio Trio 
Live at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire 25/04/22

Darragh Morgan - Violin
Tim Gill - Cello
Mary Dullea - Piano

Euryale

Dub Snitches

Anonymous text:

Le Peintre passerait pour un homme incomparable 
Si par son art, il pouvait peindre ce mouvement 
Moi bien plus adroit et cent fois plus admirable
Je fais sans me mouvoir cet effet surprenant.

Performed by Lady Clare's Consort, conducted by Jasper Schoff, Croydon Minster, 3/2/24
Recording by Sam Hunt

Par Son Art: A Year of Song in Renaissance France

Par Son Art - for double SATB choir (2024)

A setting of words by Richard Crashaw:

The world's light shines, shine as it will,
The world will love its darkness still.
I doubt though when the world's in hell,
It will not love its darkness half so well. Amen.

Performed by Guildford Cathedral Choir, conducted by Katherine Dienes-Williams, in Guildford Cathedral on 14/2/24
Recording courtesy of BBC Radio 3

Half so well - for SATB choir and organ pedals (2023)

Speed garage and breaks mix

This piece is in two halves, both starting with the same percussion gesture. Each half takes the material on different journeys, the first part ending calmly, and the second ending riotously. The title refers to the quicksilver changes between musical ideas throughout - nothing fully settles, or is heard the same way twice.


Performed by Plus-Minus Ensemble, at Milton Court Concert Hall, 21/6/24

Vicky Wright - Clarinet/Bass Clarinet
Primož Sukič - Electric Guitar
Joe Richards - Percussion
Mira Benjamin - Violin
Alice Purton - Cello
Mark Knoop - Conductor

Whistle-Stop - for mixed quintet (2024)

The title of the piece is a quotation from Coleridge’s (1772-1834) poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797). The poem tells of a day when, due to poor health, Coleridge wasn’t able to go out for a walk with his friends and instead was forced to rest in a garden in the shade of a lime-tree. Under the tree he imagined the landscape that his friends, including the poet Wordsworth (1770-1850), were walking through. Inspired by this story, my piece depicts an imaginary landscape, depicting a variety of different natural imagery, e.g., waves, birdsong, hilly fields and meadows, etc.. Pushing against this idea of Romantic natural beauty, the piece was born out of a technical study of Stravinskian hexachordal rotations, which provide the harmonic grounding for the majority of the piece. As such, the opposing qualities of Romantic day-dreaming and modernist quasi-mathematical techniques create a tension that defines the piece’s character.

The piece was premiered by conductor Jess Hoskins and harp soloist Katie Sherratt at the Royal Academy of Music on 10/01/2025.

The Many-Steepled Tract Magnificent (for Chamber Orchestra with Harp Solo)

for SATB choir, strings, harp, and percussion

Setting fragments of texts by Thomas Traherne, Richard Crashaw, John Bunyan, William Blake, and an anonymous haiku:

 Lord!
 O hear how short I breathe!
 What will Wrath's sea, so foully fierce, not dare?
 See how I tremble here beneath
 A sin! its ugly face
 More terror than its dwelling-place
 Contains, (O dreadful sin)
 Within!

 As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted
 on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down
 in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.

 From dust I rise,
 And out of nothing now awake,
 The Sun arises in the East
 Cloth'd in robes of blood and gold,
 Crown'd with warlike fires and raging desires,
 Leading towards the unknown;
 Hope's path carved anew.


Commissioned and performed by Bedford Choral Society and Bedford Sinfonia, conducted by Ian Smith in Bedford Corn Exchange on 21/6/25

The Many-Steepled Tract Magnificent (for Chamber Orchestra with Harp Solo)

Luca Zucchi

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