Young Composers Scheme, Vol. 3

Album review

In this partnership with National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (NYCGB), NMC Recordings presents choral works by four talented young composers; Kristina Arakelyan, Anna Disley-Simpson, Alexander Ho and Derri Joseph Lewis. Their work explores a broad range of themes including "coming out" as LGBTQ+, the natural environment, racial identity, love, and connection. NYCGB inspires and empowers young people throughout the UK with the life-changing experience of singing together. Founded in 1983, NYCGB comprises five choirs of over 950 young people aged 9-25 – who join together for intensive rehearsal experiences, musicianship training and high profile performances – and two training programmes for emerging professional artists: NYCGB Fellowship and Young Composers scheme.

"The global pandemic posed massive challenges for the creative industries, not least choirs and singers, who found themselves restricted to muted online activity, bereft of the benefits on in-person singing. Despite the seismic adversity for all musicians and artists, NYCGB rapidly adapted all its activity to digital delivery, enabling continued engagement with all participants and with some quite startling outcomes. The Young Composers continued to create imaginative and ground-breaking new choral works, and, as we slowly emerged from the Covid, in-person activity in the summer of 2021 was once more possible, with careful management.

This year’s cohort of composers have been lucky enough to work once more in close collaboration with both the National Youth Choir and the Fellowship ensembles, test-driving their draft scores and gathering ideas and feedback from our young singers through workshops on residential courses and masterclasses with a roll call of distinguished professional composers (including Jonathan Dove, Cheryl Francis-Hoad and Alexandra Harwood). The resulting works have been directly informed by this year’s theme of Cultural Identity - what it is to be human and the opportunities and challenges which we encounter daily. Some of the pieces have also drawn inspiration from our NYCGB 2022 theme of Environment. Most revealing throughout these new pieces is the sheer breadth of imagination and invention which this year’s composers have brought to their writing - and how refreshing to hear these new works performed and recorded by groups of singers in the same room at the same time!" (Ben Parry, NYCGB Artistic Director & Principal Conductor)
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