Paul Reade and John Casken
In this second blog about our next performance, ‘Boundless’, our Music Director Peter Broadbent introduces us to these two composers…
Paul Reade (1943-1997) spent the first part of his professional life as a repetiteur. After studying at the Royal Academy of Music he went on to the London Opera Centre and worked for a while at the Sadlers Wells Opera Company (later ENO), so his understanding of the voice was considerable.
He wrote a significant amount of instrumental music, including music for television such as the very popular Victorian Kitchen Garden, the music for which he turned into a Suite, and for which he won an Ivor Novello Award in 1991. The music for the TV adaptation of Jane Eyre made a big impact, and his theme music for The Antiques Roadshow remains a favourite.
His large-scale ballets for Sir David Bintley’s Birmingham Royal Ballet – Hobson’s Choice and Far from the Madding Crowd have a regular place in the repertoire.
In the 1980s he wrote a setting of a poem by Ian Serraillier for Guy Prothero and the English Chamber Choir called St. Brendan and the Fishes, which later became part of the JCS repertoire. He was looking for suitable texts to write a companion piece when he found a collection of Irish Poems edited by John Montague which had some wonderful English-language versions of ancient Irish verse, and the texts for both Seascapes and The Vikings were written for the Joyful Company.
Paul would have been 80 in January this year, and I am sure he would have continued to produce wonderful music in all genres had he lived beyond the age of only 54.
John Casken (b.1949) was born in Barnsley and studied at Birmingham University with John Joubert and Peter Dickinson, then at the Warsaw Academy of Music. He has been a lecturer at Birmingham and Durham Universities and spent 16 years as Professor of Music at Manchester. His students include Sir James MacMillan.
His extensive output includes music in most genres, a great deal of orchestral and chamber music and two operas, Golem and God’s Liar, both of which have been performed in several countries.
His choral music is an important part of his work, and we are pleased to be giving the London Premiere of Uncertain Sea, in which he conflates two poems by Katrina Porteous, one of which is in Northumbrian dialect. This was commissioned by the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain in 2014, and For dappled things, a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, was written as a present for the 60th Birthday of James MacMillan in 2019.
In his own words:
“Composers are often asked to describe their music – an impossible request – but when I was recently asked by the Cheltenham Festival to do this in five words, I decided that ‘windswept, dreamy, turbulent, melancholic and painterly’ just about sum it up. I also value colour, the vivid and dramatic, and I strive for a beauty of sound as well as a poetic utterance.”
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We perform ‘Boundless’ on Friday 23rd June 2023 at St. Gabriel’s Church, Pimlico.
More details and ticketing links are on our Performances page – click here.
[‘Boundless’ photo – Sunset over the Sound of Mull, September 2022, by Christopher Williams]