I Saw Eternity – Review by Laudate Magazine
"Campkin’s music often makes considerable demands of the singers, and sometimes of listeners, but it is well worth the effort, and shows both great resourcefulness and fluency and a strong sense of integrity."
22nd January 2025
I Saw Eternity – Review by Laudate Magazine
"Campkin’s music often makes considerable demands of the singers, and sometimes of listeners, but it is well worth the effort, and shows both great resourcefulness and fluency and a strong sense of integrity."
22nd January 2025
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The issue of this CD marks an important milestone for Convivium Records: their 100th recording. The recording is special in other ways as well. It is the first album recorded by the Phoenix Concert, and it will also doubtless provide a useful introduction to the work of Alexander Campkin (born 1984), despite this composer’s having already been widely recognised, notably by commissions from BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Tallis Scholars, and Vokalkapelle de Theatinerkirche Munich.
Campkin’s music often makes considerable demands of the singers, and sometimes of listeners, but it is well worth the effort, and shows both great resourcefulness and fluency and a strong sense of integrity. At times there may be parallels with fairly recent Baltic choral music, but there is a distinctive identity here. Campkin has turned a sudden reverse into a positive gain for us: his original ambition to be a viola player was cut short by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 17, leading him to concentrate instead on composition.
Phoenix Consort consists of about twenty young singers, currently or formerly students of Durham University, and founded by Adam Whitmore within the past five years. This excellent choir specialises in polyphony from the Renaissance to the present day, and one of its aims is to ‘spread choral music’s influence among young people in the UK’ (biographical notes from the CD booklet).
All the music in the present collection is sung a cappella. It ‘depicts a journey from darkness to light, reflecting the composer’s own personal journey, influenced by his own experiences’ (Programme Note), although this journey is not always an easy one to chart in terms of the choice and sequence of texts.
The programme notes on individual pieces appear under ‘Texts’, and, although often informative regarding commissions and occasions, they are sometimes shorter (or even silent) on musical information. Dates of composition are rarely given, but the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Campkin confirms what is clear, and of course perfectly acceptable – namely that many pieces date back at least to the previous decade.
The title track (6) ‘I saw Eternity’, composed in 2010, is a setting of the first five lines from ‘The World’ by Henry Vaughan (1621–95). The poet sees Eternity as full of light and calmness, while Time and its human concerns are transitory and shadowy. (Vaughan’s first stanza is quoted in full below).
Campkin’s piece for upper voices (from which there is an 18-bar quotation inside the digipack)’ employs, in the composer’s words, ‘high harmonies and gradual harmonic shifts…[and] explores suspended dissonance and consonance’. It might seem, at just over three minutes in duration, plenty long enough for the brief text, but as music for contemplation or devotion the spaciousness works.
There are two other separate but musically related pieces which include additional material from the poem: track 11 has line 1 plus lines 6 and 7, while track 13 has line 1 plus, from the final stanza, lines 8–9 and part of 10. These are similarly extended, and again work in a contemplative context.
Vaughan is clearly a favourite of Campkin’s. Track 8 is a setting of lines from ‘The Night’ under the title ‘Dazzling Darkness’. Musically the piece is effective and varied, with imaginative textures and some use of extended techniques such as whistling and humming (apparently not a standard part of Campkin’s vocabulary). It is just a little frustrating, from one point of view, that the text set, especially towards the end, is something of a patchwork of short quotations from the poem. The text of track 9 (‘Bright shadows’) is the first stanza of Vaughan’s ‘Son-Days’, again curiously minus the end of line 6 and the beginning of line 7.
The choice of words elsewhere in this CD is imaginative and varied. In track 4 (‘True Love’) we have a ‘text inspired by Shakespeare’ with Campkin’s ‘adaptation of a love poem of unknown authorship’. ‘True Love’ (track 4), a piece sung at the composer’s wedding, and ‘based on [his] ‘Heaven-Haven’. The piece begins tenderly with a progression coloured by the Lydian mode; the very long sustained high note towards the end is a challenge, and could be said to outstay its welcome. Other texts range from an adaptation of the traditional ‘Bellman’s Song’, through the late 16th/early 17th century, through the 19th to the striking ‘Flying’ by Fiunala Dowling (b. 1962) and Donald MacLeod’s ‘Tommy’s Carol’.
One ‘way into’ this collection may be through tracks 1, 5, 10 and 14. The opening track is the vigorous ‘World of Merriment’ on a slightly adapted version of the first stanza from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. ‘Sleep, Holy Babe’ (track 10) sets (intact) Edward Caswall’s strophic Christmastide text (although at nearly five minutes this item might be on the long side for use in a carol service?). ‘Awake, awake’ (‘The Bellman’s Song track 14 – the last) has some attractive quasi-medieval sonorities with bare fifths. The arrangement of ‘Sleep’ by Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) – track 5 – will be found truly fascinating by those who know the original.
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The issue of this CD marks an important milestone for Convivium Records: their 100th recording. The recording is special in other ways as well. It is the first album recorded by the Phoenix Concert, and it will also doubtless provide a useful introduction to the work of Alexander Campkin (born 1984), despite this composer’s having already been widely recognised, notably by commissions from BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Tallis Scholars, and Vokalkapelle de Theatinerkirche Munich.
Campkin’s music often makes considerable demands of the singers, and sometimes of listeners, but it is well worth the effort, and shows both great resourcefulness and fluency and a strong sense of integrity. At times there may be parallels with fairly recent Baltic choral music, but there is a distinctive identity here. Campkin has turned a sudden reverse into a positive gain for us: his original ambition to be a viola player was cut short by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 17, leading him to concentrate instead on composition.
Phoenix Consort consists of about twenty young singers, currently or formerly students of Durham University, and founded by Adam Whitmore within the past five years. This excellent choir specialises in polyphony from the Renaissance to the present day, and one of its aims is to ‘spread choral music’s influence among young people in the UK’ (biographical notes from the CD booklet).
All the music in the present collection is sung a cappella. It ‘depicts a journey from darkness to light, reflecting the composer’s own personal journey, influenced by his own experiences’ (Programme Note), although this journey is not always an easy one to chart in terms of the choice and sequence of texts.
The programme notes on individual pieces appear under ‘Texts’, and, although often informative regarding commissions and occasions, they are sometimes shorter (or even silent) on musical information. Dates of composition are rarely given, but the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Campkin confirms what is clear, and of course perfectly acceptable – namely that many pieces date back at least to the previous decade.
The title track (6) ‘I saw Eternity’, composed in 2010, is a setting of the first five lines from ‘The World’ by Henry Vaughan (1621–95). The poet sees Eternity as full of light and calmness, while Time and its human concerns are transitory and shadowy. (Vaughan’s first stanza is quoted in full below).
Campkin’s piece for upper voices (from which there is an 18-bar quotation inside the digipack)’ employs, in the composer’s words, ‘high harmonies and gradual harmonic shifts…[and] explores suspended dissonance and consonance’. It might seem, at just over three minutes in duration, plenty long enough for the brief text, but as music for contemplation or devotion the spaciousness works.
There are two other separate but musically related pieces which include additional material from the poem: track 11 has line 1 plus lines 6 and 7, while track 13 has line 1 plus, from the final stanza, lines 8–9 and part of 10. These are similarly extended, and again work in a contemplative context.
Vaughan is clearly a favourite of Campkin’s. Track 8 is a setting of lines from ‘The Night’ under the title ‘Dazzling Darkness’. Musically the piece is effective and varied, with imaginative textures and some use of extended techniques such as whistling and humming (apparently not a standard part of Campkin’s vocabulary). It is just a little frustrating, from one point of view, that the text set, especially towards the end, is something of a patchwork of short quotations from the poem. The text of track 9 (‘Bright shadows’) is the first stanza of Vaughan’s ‘Son-Days’, again curiously minus the end of line 6 and the beginning of line 7.
The choice of words elsewhere in this CD is imaginative and varied. In track 4 (‘True Love’) we have a ‘text inspired by Shakespeare’ with Campkin’s ‘adaptation of a love poem of unknown authorship’. ‘True Love’ (track 4), a piece sung at the composer’s wedding, and ‘based on [his] ‘Heaven-Haven’. The piece begins tenderly with a progression coloured by the Lydian mode; the very long sustained high note towards the end is a challenge, and could be said to outstay its welcome. Other texts range from an adaptation of the traditional ‘Bellman’s Song’, through the late 16th/early 17th century, through the 19th to the striking ‘Flying’ by Fiunala Dowling (b. 1962) and Donald MacLeod’s ‘Tommy’s Carol’.
One ‘way into’ this collection may be through tracks 1, 5, 10 and 14. The opening track is the vigorous ‘World of Merriment’ on a slightly adapted version of the first stanza from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. ‘Sleep, Holy Babe’ (track 10) sets (intact) Edward Caswall’s strophic Christmastide text (although at nearly five minutes this item might be on the long side for use in a carol service?). ‘Awake, awake’ (‘The Bellman’s Song track 14 – the last) has some attractive quasi-medieval sonorities with bare fifths. The arrangement of ‘Sleep’ by Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) – track 5 – will be found truly fascinating by those who know the original.
