To capture the fullness of what choral singing is: composer Nathan James Dearden on his debut album, i breathe

Nathan James Dearden in rehearsal with the National Youth Choir of Wales [Photo: Evan Dawson]

Composer and conductor Nathan James Dearden's debut album, i breathe, is out this month on Signum Classics. The album features choral music by Nathan performed by Choir of Royal Holloway, Kantos Chamber Choir and National Youth Choir of Wales, conducted by Rupert Gough [who I interviewed back in 2021], Ellie Slorach and Tim Rhys-Evans, alongside cellist Maxim Calver. Nathan describes the album as a personal collection and its themes draw on his Welsh identity, post-industrial landscape, memory and belonging.

Ideas for the album arose because he has had all sorts of fruitful collaborations with different choral groups yet no album. The idea for i breathe was that it would form a series of postcards of his different collaborations, representing ten years of friendships from the National Youth Choir of Wales (in which Nathan sang as a teenager) to professional choirs such as Kantos Chamber Choir to the Choir of Royal Holloway where Nathan is Composer-in-Residence.

The oldest music on the disc dates from some ten years ago and the remaining pieces are more recent. Nathan's Three Motets (from 2024) were written for the Choir of Royal Holloway, whilst Morals + Interludes (from 2020) was created in collaboration with the singers of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain Fellowship during the pandemic, completed during a residency at The Red House, Aldeburgh, the piece comprises five short choral ‘postcards’, each inspired by virtual memories drawn from the participants’ own lives, drawing on new ways of collective expression. Everything about us (from 2022) was written for the the National Youth Choir of Wales. Inspired by the young voices making music together, the piece developed out of workshops where the young singers came up with their own texts.

It is always hard putting a disc together, particularly the funding, and working with three different groups added an extra layer of challenge. But Nathan points out that you only get one debut disc. Having worked with so many different types of choir, he wanted the disc to capture the fullness of what choral singing is, from untrained rawness to sheer brilliance. When the National Youth Choir of Wales recorded Everything about us, they performed it from memory.

The Choir of Royal Holloway has very much been his learning ground. For Nathan they make a beautiful sound, a very specific sound, and their relish for the repertoire has influenced his writing. Kantos Chamber Choir is a group whose work Nathan loves, he enjoys the narrative thrust of their performances and the way they reach new audiences. Hearing them sing his pieces is like listening to his music afresh.

Nathan James Dearden & Kantos [Photo: Adam Critchlow]

Nathan has written a lot of choral music and potentially there would be material for three more discs! Themes that come out of the works selected for the disc include the landscape of his native Wales, the breath which is important both for singers and for everyone, and the idea of collective expression. He sees his pieces as postcards of moments in time, all coming together on the disc. In fact, it was only when he curated the disc that he realised there are connections between the pieces.

The texts on the album vary between ones that he has sourced, ones created in collaboration with the poet and ones he has written himself. He loves directness and 'hates fluff', texts that say this is the message with clear narrative or emotion. (This spreads into his musical tastes too and he loves the directness of the Minimalists.) One poet he mentions is Katherine Towers whose short form poems with their abstract narratives have immediacy and clarity. There is not a lot on the page but you can open doors with it. Nathan set one of Towers's poems in his song The way we go which was written for mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston in 2020.

He has set both Welsh and English, though the two are very different. He comments that there are a lot of potential problems with Welsh because of the way the language is structured, the pauses, the breath and the stress. There is a lot of baggage. He rather likes bilingual works, setting both Welsh and English. With English he treats the language quite abstractly, though he uses the pauses in the language and finds he can be more playful in English.

He started as a singer in the National Youth Choir of Wales, moving on to working as a professional singer with the BBC and others. Composing was initially an outshoot of having lots of singer friends. The teachers at Cardiff University encouraged him and in his second year he paid more attention to composing and began to devour other composers' scores. Vocal and choral music became his home language. Some years he has written a lot for voices and other years, the focus has been more in instrumental so that last year he wrote instrumental works including a piano trio, whereas this year's focus is on his new choral album.

Is there a Dearden symphony in him? Potentially. He has been teaching orchestration, but symphonic is not a language he is comfortable in and he finds it difficult to speak as Nathan. That said, he has worked with lots of orchestras but admits that the can come away wishing that he'd done that differently. His final comment about a symphony? If you set him in a dark room for a year...

He both composes and conducts; he confesses that he rarely conducts his own music (though he does so on the new disc). He feels that he is more analytical as a conductor whereas as a composer he is messy, he likes using some improvised elements and aleatoric passages. On the disc he conducts the Choir of Royal Holloway in one track, suo. He admits he struggled a bit, seeing the work with a different lens which was not helpful for the music. He is acutely aware of breath in his music, where the pauses happen. This is something he thinks about a lot, particularly when conducting his music in his head.

During 2026 his work Mamiaith (Welsh for mother tongue) was performed at the 2026 Eisteddfod Genedlaethol (National Eisteddfod). This is a work in progress, a collaboration with Music Theatre Wales, Tŷ Cerdd and Eisteddfod Genedlaethol. Three opera scenes setting words by Siwan Llynor, the piece examines a hard-hitting topic about the imprisonment of women protesting the equality of the Welsh language. Nathan says that it is a powerful story, though he admits that it is not his story. He comes from an English-speaking family who lived in a Welsh community and he learned Welsh as a second language. He feels that Mamiaith is doing something for different voices; the events it refers to are not long ago and are part of a forgotten history, something that fascinates Nathan, He has had interesting conversations with his librettist, Siwan Llynor and their ambition is for a bigger work, though he is also talking about other operatic ideas.

Currently the CD its release is taking up a lot of brain space. But looking ahead he has a project with Ruth Evans working in the eight ancient counties of Wales to tell stories in each of the places. The first was with a community ensemble in Wrexham, then in Powys they are working with local schools. The project has a social purpose, with people telling their stories. He has a project writing for Only Boys Aloud Choir, the choir for boys aged 13 to 19 run by the Aloud Foundation which aims to both keep Welsh traditions alive, and teach new skills. Nathan's project will involve the boys working with male voice choirs, so the boys get to sing with the original male voice choirs of miners, some of whom have been singing since the 1970s.

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