THE ESSEX SUMMER OPERA FESTIVAL 2024

Noah Max Rapture (world premiere)

A newly composed song-cycle by "fizzing creative fuse" (The Sunday Times) Noah Max, with text from the award-winning 2005 collection by Carol Ann Duffy.

7pm Wednesday 19 June 2024

£15 | £25 front rows 

The Show

Duffy’s Rapture follows the narrator as they fall in love and then lose their beloved. Noah Max’s song cycle setting rearranges the story, starting with what has been lost before working back to the height of love, almost in a dream: “You pass the moon to me, like a loving cup. I roll you the sun.”

The performance will be the world premiere of the work, and has been created in collaboration with the Essex Book Festival (1-30 June 2024).

Susanna MacRae, Soprano | Raymond Brien, Clarinet | Pavel Timofeyevsky, Piano

A note from Noah Max

Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture is "essential for the broken-hearted of all ages" (Rose Tremain, The Guardian): the former Laureate's anthology explores passion and loss, intimacy and secrecy, ecstasy and agony. What makes this collection so distinctive is the way it weaves contrasting flavours - death and legacy, guilt and shame - into a pageant which flows with so much passion it feels almost through-composed. This new song cycle is scored for soprano, clarinet and piano; the clarinet acts as the 'other lover' whose voice we hear only tenuously in the text.

Part I: 1. Grief; 2. Rain; 3. Name; 4. Here (Haworth); 5. World.
Part II: 1. Elegy; 2. Row; 3. Intermezzo; 4. Give; 5. Finding the Words.
Part III: 1. Snow; 2. Ithaca; 3. Your Move; 4. Over.

Read and listen to all the poems in full here.
Read Margaret Reynolds’s glowing review of the award-winning collection for The Guardian here.

We look forward to welcoming you to Layer Marney Tower for the third Essex Summer Opera Festival.

Nicholas & Sheila Charrington, Layer Marney Tower
Aki, Orlando and Max, the Wild Arts team

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About Noah Max:

British-Austrian composer Noah Max’s output spans opera, orchestral and chamber music. In 2021 his string trio Sojourn won The Clements Prize and was performed by members of the Piatti Quartet at Conway Hall. His music has been performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall and the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room in London, as well as Vienna’s Musikverein, Altalena Festival in Budapest, Uilenburgersjoel Synagogue in Amsterdam and the Paderewski Academy in Poland.

‘A high degree of textural inventiveness… marvellously scored… the vocal lines [are] athletic and colourful. Max himself conducted the performance with clarity and complete commitment. A remarkable achievement for a young composer… he is in the first stages of a notable career.’

Bernard Hughes, The Arts Desk

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World (from Rapture)

On the other side of the world,
you pass the moon to me,
like a loving cup,
or a quaich.
I roll you the sun.

I go to bed,
as you’re getting up
on the other side of the world.
You have scattered the stars
towards me here, like seeds

in the earth.
All through the night,
I have sent you
bunches, bouquets, of cloud
to the other side of the world;

so my love will be shade
where you are,
and yours,
as I turn in my sleep,
the bud of a star.

wildarts.org.uk

The opera barn, picnic lawn and loos at Layer Marney Tower are fully accessible. The seating in the opera barn is flexible and we can accommodate wheelchairs easily. The boxes and rear stall seats are on a raised area in the barn with two steps. We will reserve parking places for blue badge holders by the entrance through to the opera courtyard. Please email us at info@wildarts.org.uk for any access or seating questions and we'd be very happy to help.