UYMP University of York Music Press

Robert Saxton - recent works

1 September 2004

Robert Saxton's Five Motets was premiered at last year's Proms by Edward Wickham and The Clerk's Group. It has been repeated by them in Holland, and performed in London as part of Chris Batchelor's St Pancras Church 20th Century Music Festival.

Saxton comments on his other recent vocal work, Alternative Canticles (for Stephen Darlington at Christ Church, Oxford), 'I've tried to create a polyphonic web, less chromatic than my earlier style, but a genuine polyphony with detailed vertical control. ...In the process of crafting such music, I felt like one of my ancestors of an eastern ghetto, tailoring a suit: made to the occasion.'* Saxton has also just completed a setting of Locus Iste for choir and organ, commissioned by St Catharine's College, Cambridge for the 350th anniversary of the consecration of the chapel in November 2004.

* Extract reproduced from the November/December 2003 issue of Choir & Organ by permission. Copyright © Orpheus Publications Ltd 2003. www.choirandorgan.com.

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