Walking Shadows

Aoife Mannix and Stephen McNeff

A new choral work by composer Stephen McNeff and poet Aoife Mannix is being premiered by Canticum Choir, conductor Mark Forkgen, at the church of St Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, London on 30 October 2018, as part of a programme which also includes Mozart's Requiem. McNeff and Mannix's Walking in the Shadows is written to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War and the piece tells the story of four people in a landscape of war. McNeff and Mannix researched it by visiting Northern France and Flanders to help us understand how the War affected not only the combatants, but those who nursed them and what it all meant for the people back home. 

Unusually for a First World War commemorative choral work, McNeff and Mannix come at it from an angle and tell the stories of four very different individuals caught up in the maelstrom of conflict. The piece is in fact, the first libretto that Aoife Mannix has written, though she has written quite a lot of performance poetry performed with live music. You can read more about it on Aoife Mannix's blog posting.

The programme is completed by Mozart's Requiem with Mark Forkgen conducting Canticum and Counterpoint with soloists Lucy Bray, Amy Lyddon, Michael Bennett, and Steffan Lloyd Owen.

Full details from the St Martin in the Fields website.