Young Composers 5: the latest iteration of the National Youth Choir's Young Composers scheme challenge & stimulate

Young Composers 5: Millicent B James, Will Harmer, Emily Hazrati, Alex Tay; National Youth Choir, NYC Fellowship Ensemble, Emily Dickens, Ben Parry
Reviewed 5 February 2024

Vivid use of texture, imaginative subject matter and challenging writing clearly stimulate the young singers who give wonderfully engaged performances

Each year the the National Youth Choir's Young Composers scheme offers a programme to support a group of young composers including residential courses, workshops, peer and professional mentoring, digital releases and performance showcases. And for the fifth year running, NMC has captured the results on disc. The result is a selection of engaging and thoughtful new choral music by Millicent B James, Will Harmer, Emily Hazrati, and Alex Tay performed by the National Youth Choir, conducted by Emily Dickens, and the NYC Fellowship Ensemble, conducted by Ben Parry.

The disc begins with Children of the Forest by Millicent B James setting her own words. The music produces some strong images from the choir, mixing different techniques including free sections evoking the sound of the forest itself, but also chant that seems almost Middle Eastern. All in a wonderfully vivid performance from the National Youth Choir, whose members seem to relish the challenge James sets them.

The NYC Fellowship Ensemble perform Will Harmer's Three Madrigals. Setting a text from the 19th century along with two 16th century ones, Harmer's writing takes the idea of the madrigal into the 21st century. The writing is diverse, there are hints of folk music alongside suggestions of the Kings Singers; sometimes catchy, sometimes intimate and sometimes vigorous, the music imaginatively reinvents tradition.

NYC Fellowship Ensemble & Ben Parry at recording session, October 2023 (Photo: Belinda Parry)

The National Youth Choir sings Emily Hazrati's One Thousand Threads which was created in collaboration with the writer Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh, celebrating their shared Iranian heritage, with music and text inspired by the image of a fraying Persian rug, and nods towards rhythmic and structural elements of Iranian folk music. An exciting and colourful piece, Hazrati assembles multiple layers of different types of sound and overlays with with melodies and rhythm, with the excitement of the piece clearly being enjoyed by the singers.

Alex Tay's intriguing Rainflow'rs comes next, sung by the NYC Fellowship Ensemble. Setting his own text, Tay combines a series of choral gestures using opaque harmonies with smaller vocal gestures that imbue the work with a sense of improvisation. He builds varied textures and complex structures from intimate moments, yet with flashes of anger too.

Will Harmer's Fireworks, sung by the full choir, sets a 19th century travel writer and Harmer uses her description as a framework for a piece that manages to be complex and intriguing, combining opaque harmonies with dramatic rhythms and moments of mesmerising beauty. And the choir also sings Alex Tay's DEEP (HUH?!) which though written with a deep sense of irony, manages to be a brilliant reinvention of choral forces.

The fellowship ensemble continues with Emily Hazrati's khãné (meditations on home) setting words by four of the NYC Fellows, thoughts about what home means to them. Hazrati combines intimate, close harmony with an imaginative use of textures and the suspicion that it is a challenge to sing. We end with Millicent B James' Finding Your Home, setting her own words with vibrant, strong-minded harmonies, but then real close-harmony allied to vivid rhythms.

Millicent B James, Will Harmer, Emily Hazrati, Alex Tay, NYC Fellowship Ensemble & Ben Parry at recording session, October 2023 (Photo: Belinda Parry)

The results are a vivid selection of imaginative ways of writing for choir. Clearly the young composers have all been experimenting, perhaps with an over-fondness for texture over structure, but certainly the young singers of the choir and the ensemble have responded with wonderfully engaged performances.

Millicent B James - Children of the Forest
Will Harmer - Three Madrigals
Emily Hazrati - One Thousand Threads
Alex Tay - RainFlow’rs
Will Harmer - Fireworks
Alex Tay - DEEP (HUH?!)
Emily Hazrati - khãné (meditations on home)
Millicent B James - Finding Your Home
National Youth Choir Fellowship Ensemble (Ailsa Campbell & Emily Varney, soprano, Sarina Rattan & Olivia Shotton, alto, Timothy Peters & Chris O’Leary, tenor, Antonio Oliveira & Jason Ching, bass)
National Youth Choir
Emily Dickens (conductor)
Ben Parry (conductor)
Recorded at Royal Academy of Music on 2 September, 2023, & School Farm Studios on 14 October, 2023
NMC Records NMC DL3056 1CD [43:07]

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