Further Reading
26th July 2024
Presto Music are excited to announce that, in collaboration with Nimbus Music Publishing, we now offer a selection of sheet music by Richard Blackford. Find out more.
At the core of Blackford’s work is a setting of theStabat Mater; but it also includes settings of tworelevant poems by the celebrated Russian poet AnnaAkhmatova from her poem cycle Requiem. The poemsecho the words in Stabat Mater reflecting the grief of amother for her son Lev, a student at LeningradUniversity, who, in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s terror,was arrested in his dormitory room and shipped to anArctic labour camp. For 17 months his mother waitedin queues and wrote letters to police officialsbeseeching them to tell her the fate of her son. Herstruggle is immortalised in “Requiem”, her mostfamous work. Alternating between elegy, lamentationand witness, it culminates in its most famous stanza:For seventeen months I’ve been crying out,Calling you home.I flung myself at the hangman’s feet,For you my son, my horror. The music embraces the passion of these words.After our recent workshop when the BournemouthSymphony Chorus studied the work for the first time,conductor Gavin Carr wrote: “It is so compact, and sopowerful: the intensity is incredible, and the release at the end is remarkable.” - Sandrey Date
- ISMN: 9790708167150 (M708167150)
