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- Tarik O'Regan
The Night's Untruth (2010)
- Novello & Co Ltd (World)
A co-commission celebrating the tenth anniversary of JAM (The John Armitage Memorial Trust) and the fortieth anniversary of VocalEssence.
- hn.2tpt.tbn.tba/org
- SATB
- 16 min
- Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), S. Daniel and Crane
- English
Programme Note
First performance: 25 March 2010, St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London; BBC Singers; Stephen Disley, organ; Onyx Brass; Nicholas Cleobury, conductor.
The Night’s Untruth explores the use of sleep as metaphor by dint of excerpts from poems written in the 17th to 20th centuries. Death, love, fear, ecstasy, isolation, dreaming and rest are all textual “variations” on the “theme” of sleep and can be found in the chosen texts. The work’s title is taken from a line in a poem by Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) and speaks to the composition’s focus on sleep as a parallel, possibly dystopian, existence to the one experienced in our waking hours.
Tarik O’Regan
March 2010
The Night’s Untruth explores the use of sleep as metaphor by dint of excerpts from poems written in the 17th to 20th centuries. Death, love, fear, ecstasy, isolation, dreaming and rest are all textual “variations” on the “theme” of sleep and can be found in the chosen texts. The work’s title is taken from a line in a poem by Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) and speaks to the composition’s focus on sleep as a parallel, possibly dystopian, existence to the one experienced in our waking hours.
Tarik O’Regan
March 2010
Scores
Reviews
'O'Regan is a master at setting text'
16th April 2012
...intensely atmospheric....
2nd November 2010
…an inspiring work, exploring sonorous and theatrical potential of the choir and brass, with only modest contributions from the organ. …[it] reflects how, in writing this piece in Princeton, O’Regan has found his voice in America, having imbibed impressions of Copland, for instance, in the melancholy trumpet’s eventide yearning to the wide-open prairies, while inflecting a European sensibility in the choral writing – a shifting, fluid sound-world of suspensions and unresolving harmonies.
1st July 2010
The most impressive [new work] was Tarik O'Regan's The Night's Untruth, with standout soloists from the BBC Singers and organist Stephen Disley adding to the rich, complex textures that maximised the potential of the musical material. In this setting of extracts from poems dealing with sleep by Keats, Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel and Hart Crane, O'Regan's technical skills are superb, and the result has a directness that is perfectly matched by the subtlety of its means.
31st March 2010