Concerts by Candlelight

At the core of the programme is Edmund Finnis’s intensely mesmerising The Centre is Everywhere. From here, concentric circles radiate outwards, each one encompassing a pair of works that reflect each other in subtle ways: two works turned towards the sacred; a set of intricate canons; a pair of violin duets; and two musical gifts (the Musical Offering from Bach, and a festive farewell in the form of Carol of the Bells). This overall sense of symmetry becomes distilled into stricter geometric expression in pieces by J.S. Bach, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt, where discipline and freedom push and pull, in an intoxicating dance that expands the boundaries of the possible.

Another is Manchester Collective’s poetic offering, penned after commissioning (and then falling in awe with) the piece in 2019: “His music is a breath on the wind. His music is light dancing on water. His music is a lover’s whisper in the dead of night. It is both beautiful and strange.”

On the other side of our symmetry line rests Arvo Pärt’s Summa, which he deemed “the most strict and enigmatic” of his tintinnabuli compositions. As with Bach’s complex counterpoint, Pärt’s compositional system creates a simultaneous feeling of stillness and movement, of ambivalence and spirituality; and, like Crumb, we’re left with the undeniable feeling of a musical alchemist at work. Inspired by the Latin Credo text, its surface simplicity rocks and cradles us, a powerful evocation of the all- encompassing purity of faith.

Stepping outwards, we find ourselves revisiting Bach’s mesmeric world of mirrors, this time inviting you to consider how our brains attempt to understand the musical patterns they absorb.

In this canon from Bach’s epic Art of Fugue, we can clearly hear the opening voice. The second one soon imitates – but it’s upside down, and at half the speed, and… our brains are swiftly, pleasantly lost within this precisely-plotted aural kaleidoscope. It is, in the words of Jonathan Morton, “a source of endless wonder” – which is perhaps why artists have been so drawn to trying to decipher and splay its code in visual form. We particularly fell for the beautiful work of artist Stephen Malinowski – we hope you will, too.

As with Reich’s Duet, Anna Clyne’s Prince of Clouds plays with the idea of musical cells being passed back and forth; “I was contemplating the presence of musical lineage – a family-tree of sorts that passes from generation to generation”, said Clyne.

But in contrast to Reich’s hazy, cradling warmth, the sweet serenity of the opening is interrupted by an electrical storm – all lightning stabs, sudden currents, disjointed whims, beginnings but no endings, and our need for mirrors, for symmetry, the completion of the pattern, is disrupted.

We’ll complete ours now. We began with an offering, so we’ll end with a gift: an arrangement, by Daniel Pioro, of a carol that sweeps us forwards with positivity, verve and spark.

Carol of The Bells was originally a song for the new year, not Christmas. Derived from a Ukranian folk chant, it tells of a swallow flying into a household to tell the family of the plentiful, abundant year awaiting them (its original title comes from the Ukranian for ‘bountiful’).

Following a sweet chorale comes the electric shiver of excitement of that famous motif – spiked with the vibrancy, exuberance and hope of an ice-bright star in a jet-black sky. As Daniel states, “it should sound like wind whipping round the sky, a whirling snowstorm, the dark, impish, mischievous excitement of festival…”

We hope it propels you outwards, onwards and forwards into an abundant 2021.