ROXANNA PANUFNIK

 

Beastly Tales                                         

 

Patricia Rozario - soprano, Yvonne Howard  -mezzo-soprano, Roderick Williams - baritone

City of London Sinfonia/ Sian Edwards

 

This charming disc features colourful and engaging settings by Roxanna Panufnik of three poems taken from Vikram Seth’s Beastly Tales from Here and There.

 

Roxanna writes “These beautifully crafted and witty retellings of some internationally well-known stories – as well as a couple of new tales by Seth himself, including “The Frog and the Nightingale” – are intensely musical and immediately conjure up kaleidoscopic images and textures. Solo voices and orchestra are the ideal vehicle to bring them to life. So when Stephen Carpenter, chief executive of the City of London Sinfonia, asked me the composer’s dream question “If there was something you’d like to write for soloists and orchestra, what would it be?”, a happy five-year collaboration in a series of Beastly commissions ensued.”

 

The three tales are: The Crocodile and the Monkey; The Frog and the Nightingale; The Hare and the Tortoise.

 

Roxanna Panufnik studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, where she gained a GRSM (Hons), LRAM and ARAM. Since then she has written a wide range of pieces - opera, ballet, music theatre, choral works, chamber music and scores for film and television - which have been performed all over the world.

 

Highlights of her output include the Westminster Mass, which was commissioned for Westminster Cathedral Choir on the occasion of Cardinal Hume’s 75th birthday and subsequently recorded for CD by the choir with the City of London Sinfonia; The Music Programme, an opera for Polish National Opera’s millennium season that received its UK première at the BOC Covent Garden Festival in May 2000; a critically acclaimed harp concerto, Powers and Dominions; and Leda, a ballet for English National Ballet and Wratislava Cantans.

 

EMI 3566922