A dream of winter

Notes

These four settings of poems by Edward Thomas (1878-1917) were written in the summer of 2012 for the wonderful girls’ choir of St. Catharine’s College, conducted by Edward Wickham, who performed them for the first time in St. Margaret’s Church, Hemingford Abbots on 17 November 2012. I have known Thomas’s ‘Tall Nettles’ since my schooldays but the other three poems were new discoveries amongst the 142 poems he wrote between 1914 and his death at the Battle of Arras in the penultimate year of the First World War. I love the objectivity of Thomas’s depiction of the world and the way in which this allows him to reveal the strangeness within the ordinary; I have tried to match this in the music.

Premiered by St. Catharine’s College Cambridge Girls’ Choir, St. Margaret’s Church, Hemingford Abbots, 17 November 2012.

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