As part of a 'BBC Singers in Good Friday music' programme broadcast on 24th April, BBC Radio 3 featured a recording of James Weeks's Orlando Tenebrae from a concert by the choir conducted by the composer himself.
BBC Radio 3 broadcast James Weeks conducting 'Orlando Tenebrae'
25 April 2019The work can be heard online for a limited time here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00048d8
Composed in 2010 for choir and narrator, Orlando Tenebrae sets Tenebrae Responsory texts in a secular context of modern poetry to explore themes of oppression, suffering and hope.
Weeks writes:
There is a great upsurge of human-inflicted suffering in the world today: our capacity for inhumanity towards each other (to say nothing of other living creatures) seems to be boundless. I turned to the texts of the Tenebrae as a way to deal with this ever-more pressing subject in a timeless way, trying to avoid contemporary agitprop but at the same time removing them from an explicitly Christian context. I found several Tenebrae texts that speak of oppression in a general sense, and to them added four poems from Fire in the Soul, a collection of poems from around the world on the subject of human rights, published by New Internationalist.
The BBC Singers concert was recorded on Friday 12th April 2019 in St Paul's Church Knightsbridge, London. Their performance of Orlando Tenebrae can be heard alongside other works from the concert, by Tomás Luis de Victoria and Heinrich Schütz, on the BBC Radio 3 website for 30 days after the broadcast date.
More news
28 March 2024
Late Music York April concerts
14 March 2024
Weeks’ ‘Primo Libro’ released by Ekmeles, on New Focus Recordings
1 March 2024
Micklegate Singers Concert (23/03/24) to Feature First Performance of 'A Quaker Triology'
29 February 2024
Late Music York - March concerts
16 February 2024
Choir & Organ Magazine Features Robert Saxton and Jonathan Clinch
12 February 2024
DR Vocal Ensemble perform Saxton in Copenhagen and Aarhus
6 February 2024
COVID in Music: Thomas Simaku 'Catena III – Corona'
1 February 2024
'Apocalypse: Choral music by David Lancaster' Receives 5-Star Review
31 January 2024
Late Music York's second half of concert season commences this weekend
30 January 2024
Sadie Harrison’s '....ad infinitum....' for multi-tracked violins released on CD
15 January 2024
David Lumsdaine, 1931-2024
8 January 2024
5-star Review in France for Thomas Simaku’s New Album