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Mr McFall’s Chamber commissions composer Errollyn Wallen
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Mr McFall’s Chamber, Scottish ensemble with a taste of programming adventures, teams up with inimitable composer Errollyn Wallen to create a new acoustic live music performance, ‘Island life – celebrating Caribbean connections’. With support from the PRS for Music Foundation, Belize-born Errollyn has been commissioned to write a new song cycle for strings and soprano voice. Errollyn and Artistic Director Robert McFall aim to celebrate the cultural connections between Central America and Scotland through a theme of sea histories. The creative brief asks the composer to set to music the poems of Scottish and Caribbean poets. The selected texts are:
On the Shore of the Mind, Derek Walcott (b. St Lucia 1930)
Fishing off the back of Rousay, Ian Hamilton Finlay (b. Nassau 1925, d. Scotland 2006)
Epitaph, Dennis Scott (Jamaica, 1939-1991)
Penelope, Lorna Goodison (b. Jamaica 1947)
Evening Will Come, Ian Hamilton Finlay
Robert, as Artistic Director, will curate a complementary programme of music supporting this theme, including sea-faring songs by Henry Purcell, Kurt Weill and Robert Burns The band of five string players will be joined on stage by Scottish soprano Susan Hamilton for performances in early Autumn 2015 across Scotland and England, which will be live-streamed to audiences in Jamaica, Belize and other Caribbean countries and communities in the UK. The project includes a creative development period for Errollyn and the performing artists, as well as pre-concert talks for audiences discussing writing for words and music, and the stories behind the programme.