The Bach Choir: Four Choral Seasons

Great poetry marks the seasons in a new work for choir and orchestra by Roxanna Panufnik. This world premiere opens the Choir’s 2019/20 season.

Four Choral Seasons sets poems by Christina Rosetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Shakespeare. The piece commences with Laurence Binyon’s evocative poem beginning ‘Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.’

Alongside it, cellist Raphael Wallfisch performs the final work of composer Ernest Bloch’s Jewish Cycle, Schelomo. A majestic journey for cello and orchestra, it tells the tale of King Solomon.

The choir then performs Delius’s Sea Drift, an intensely emotional work full of rich choral harmony, based on the poignant story of two seabirds in Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass.