I’m delighted to share the release of Wishing Tree, the newest album from The Gesualdo Six!
When we first stepped outside the stone walls of the Cambridge chapels where we had spent our first year performing together, we embarked on a tour that contained what might well be described as a smorgasbord of music. The first half alone ran to over an hour! I like to think our programming has grown a little more disciplined since then, but the green shoots of this collection, now called Wishing Tree, first appeared during that summer tour of 2015, when we gave ten concerts over nine days, bundled into a seven-seater with our suitcases.
Wishing Tree takes the listener on a choral journey through time, poetry, and song, rooted in tradition yet alive with contemporary expression. This programme explores a more secular repertoire than our previous albums, moving from Renaissance works that celebrate nature and love to contemporary settings, in which composers breathe fresh life into the verses of Christina Rossetti and Kathleen Jamie. A number of pieces cast light on childhood, conjuring moments of innocence which are lost and then found. Interwoven throughout are re-imaginings of traditional British folk songs, arranged by musicians continuing a longstanding tradition of developing and reshaping existing material—a tradition championed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Lucy Broadwood in the late nineteenth century.
It also features my own piece, Fantasia on English children’s songs, which was commissioned by Opus Anglicanum in September 2014 and first performed later that year. From the outset, I imagined a piece animated by a sense of play, in which a children’s choir would occasionally join the chorus. Out of a more dream-like opening, fragments of familiar tunes begin to surface: Sing a song of sixpence, Old MacDonald had a farm, Mary, Mary, quite contrary, and Oranges and lemons, framed by the call of Boys and girls come out to play. These melodies are overlapped and gently reshaped, often sounding at the same time. My hope was to preserve something of their innocence, while layering them to create soft, unexpected dissonances. Elsewhere the songs move together, forming a brighter, more animated texture.
