Tag Archive: 0compositions

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, but things have been busy. After an enjoyable summer break, visiting Nîmes amongst other places (including one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres in the world, c.100 AD), September saw me in York, teaching at the annual York Antiquarian Book Seminar, before heading off to Berlin, for […]

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’ve blogged before about translating, and then setting, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. As yesterday was International Translation Day, I thought this week I’d write about another piece of mine, At Cana. This was actually what first brought me to Rilke, when, in 2019, I was looking for a text to set for a […]

Trying to promote one’s music during a global pandemic is not the easiest thing in the world: choirs are mostly not functioning, and choral directors have been on furlough, or are busy trying to work out how best to proceed in line with current restrictions. So I was excited to receive the following e-mail this […]

This week I should have been singing at Ely Cathedral with a group of friends called the Pearce Singers, a choir which arose some years ago out of those of us who used to sing with Tring Parish Church Choir when we were growing up. Back in the 1980s and early 90s, we would go […]

Following on from previous blogposts on The Greatest Refreshment, Advent Calendar, and Three Heine Love Songs, I thought I would write a little about another piece of mine, The World to me. Its text is the poem ‘World’ from Carol Ann Duffy‘s 2005 book Rapture, words I had actually wanted to set for a long […]