Simon’s setting of Rowan Williams’s poem ‘Advent Calendar’ was broadcast by the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, on BBC Radio 3 in 2008. The late John McCabe, whose own The last and greatest Herald was premiered during the same broadcast, wrote: ‘I simply found it gripping and moving. I felt your grasp of harmony and harmonic progression was particularly impressive. And the response to the excellent poem was vivid.’

I had wanted to set this poem for a long time. I first came across it when Carol Ann Duffy was made Poet Laureate, in 2009. I had never read any of her work when her appointment was announced, and was pleasantly surprised when I found, on a transatlantic flight, that Juliet Stevenson reading her collection Rapture was among British Airways’ inflight entertainment choices. I was flying to the US for a week, away from home, and the poem resonated—and stayed—with me.

Another setting of Rowan Williams' poetry. I was lucky enough to meet him at a concert in December 2019, at which my setting of his 'Advent Calendar' was performed, and was delighted when he said it was 'a wonderful setting' and, of all the settings of the words, the closest in feeling to his original poem. I asked if I could set others of his poems, and he kindly agreed. 'To Our Lady' is the result. The poem it sets, 'Our Lady of Vladimir', describes the famous 12th-century Russian icon.

Anna Akhmatova’s poem, written in 1912, and published two years later in her second collection, Chetki (‘Rosary’), was commended to me a few years ago by a friend who had read it in another – unrhymed – English translation. Curious, I sought out the Russian original which, as I thought, does rhyme, and so I set about producing a rhymed English version, partly as a challenge to myself, and partly as a gift for my friend. Then the pandemic arrived, and the world changed. I wanted to write a piece in response to being in lockdown, and Akhmatova’s words, which focus on being alone with one’s thoughts, seemed to fit.