London National Portrait Gallery Presents Centenary Choral Event
The deceptively simple lyrics and melodies of David Lang's Memorial Ground, sung by a massed chorus of voices young and old at the East Neuk Festival on 2 July this year, made for a powerfully moving musical premiere to mark the beginning of the Battle of the Somme a century ago. To commemorate the end of that devastating 21-week battle, a specially revised version of Memorial Ground is performed at a free ticketed event in London at the National Portrait Gallery in November as part of 14-18 NOW, the UK's arts programme for the First World War centenary.
The young singers (7-14 years) of South London's Pembroke Academy of Music (PAM) Community Choir and south London's homeless chorus, The Choir with No Name, will join the National Portrait Gallery's resident choir under the directorship of its artistic director Gregory Batsleer* for a promenade concert through the first floor galleries, where early 20th century portraits so relevant to this wartime period are on display.
Memorial Ground comprises a basic 'ground' or hymn sung by the choirs, over which individual solos of specific wartime remembrances and sentiments are sung or spoken. Composer David Lang relishes the emotional power of human voices because 'there's no instrument between them and us, and they're just telling us something. It's the closest thing to a memoir or personal statement that a musician can give.'
In order to accommodate a sense of both personal and communal casualties of wartime, the repeated phrases of the underlying hymn convey the ritual and prayer of shared remembrance, while the solos communicate individual stories. Solo texts for this performance will be a combination of stories written by the children of the PAM choir and sourced texts from the NPG archives, making it another unique recital.
The Portrait Choir will also sing Sir Hubert Parry's elegiac Songs of Farewell (composed in the last years of his life and published 1916-18) interspersed with poetry readings.
* also chorus master of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus which performed the world premiere of Memorial Ground
Memorial Ground is co-commissioned by East Neuk Festival and 14-18 NOW: WWI Centenary Art Commissions, supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England and by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with the support of Creative Scotland.
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