Tag Archive: 0Rilke

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

According to The New Oxford Book of Carols, this year marks the 125th anniversary of the famous carol known in English as ‘Gabriel’s Message’. It is actually a translation, by Sabine Baring-Gould, of a Basque carol, Birjina gaztettobat zegoen, which was collected by the French musician Charles Bordes and published in his Dix cantiques populaires […]