Acclaimed composer and poet unite to mark Bray Choral Society's anniversary
The highlight of the evening was The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace by Karl Jenkins, originally commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum. Composed in 1999. The work is dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo conflict, part of the broader and devastating Balkan wars of the early 1990s.
Accompanied by imagery projected on screens in the church, the performance was widely praised as both powerful and deeply moving and was met huge applause from a full Holy Redeemer Church. The performance in Bray followed a similarly spellbinding concert in St Andrew's Church, in Westland Row, on Saturday.
Keith Brennan, the poet and farmer from Roscommon, was commissioned to write the lyrics to 'The Creation Song of the Choir of Light'. He told RTE's Philip Boucher Hayes how it came about and described working with Howard Goodall to compose the piece.
'Howard Goodall, had seen and heard my writing about my life on a small, unkempt, half-wild, Roscommon farm. And he thought to set some of that life and home to music. I have never done anything of the sort. To take my words and have them weaved into the sung air seemed, still seems, like a kind of magic,' he said.
"The piece begins on a morning on the farm. The ragged thorn hedges. The curl of wind through trees. The rising tide of birdsong that breaks over the fields. I talk to Howard. Of pine martins. Sapphire-eyed sparrowhawks. Of farmer friends in love with cuckoos and swallows. Of the leverets I find in the rushy lee of a field. The furious greening that grips the spring world.
'The ramshackle hedges and pastures that let slip tumbles of wildflowers from the fields that flow out and along roads and across woodlands. He talked to me of choral music. Of Brexit and of culture wars. The public and private loneliness of Covid. Of how community can be made by music. Song.
'And because, as both Howard and I believe, wherever we share with one another the experience of beautiful things, the divides are blurred,' he continued. 'The gap between people close and is bridged. We are pulled a little closer in the sharing. And in the sharing we build community. So it is in my farm. So it is in my neighbours' fields. And so it will be, I think, when the choir sing.'
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