Category Archive: Composer

Last week, I delighted to read the following five-star review of the new album of my choral music from Choir & Organ magazine: The musical world of Simon Beattie is, in the main, lush, chromatic and lyrical. An antiquarian bookseller by profession, he has clearly taken great care with his choice of texts, translating some […]

I’m delighted to announce the release of an album of my choral music recorded by the critically acclaimed London Choral Sinfonia under Michael Waldron: https://orchid-music.lnk.to/theworldtome In the sleeve notes, he writes: ‘I first came across Simon’s music several years ago. I was initially grabbed by a setting of Advent Calendar – a setting of a […]

Rilke wrote Das Marien-Leben at the castle at Duino, on the Italian Adriatic coast, in late 1911 and early 1912, just before he began work on what was to become the monumental Duineser Elegien.  In the preface to his translation in 1951, Stephen Spender notes that ‘Rilke wrote of the Marien-Leben as being “a little […]

Happy New Year! January is going to be busy: firstly, getting everything ready to exhibit at the California book fair next month and secondly, recording a CD of my music with the wonderful ensemble London Choral Sinfonia.  It’s hard to believe that’s it’s almost twenty years since I wrote Advent Calendar, one of my first […]

Although famously dubbed ‘das Land ohne Musik’, England has in fact always enjoyed a rich choral tradition, in large part thanks to its cathedral choirs of boys and men (now finally with female voices among them, too) who have sung daily services for, quite literally, centuries, broken only by the dictates of Oliver Cromwell and, […]

Some exciting news this week: I have had my first piece published, by the excellent Encore Publications. The piece, The Angel and the Unicorn, I blogged about once before, after I had written it during lockdown back in 2020. At the time, it still hadn’t been performed, but now it has, by the Choir of […]