Hallé Choirs

BBC Singers, Hallé Choirs, BBC Philharmonic, Ben Gernon, Vimbayi Kaziboni – Emily Howard: The Anvil (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:52 minutes | 594 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delphian Records

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.

To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs – each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur – and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day?

A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope will survive.

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