The Angry Planet: An environmental cantata

for children's choir, SATB chamber choir, and SATB double choir This monumental cantata for massed forces was commissioned by David Hill and The Bach Choir and premiered as part of the 2012 BBC Proms. Setting a specially commissioned text by Charles Bennett, Chilcott skilfully uses both metred and unmetered sung and spoken lines to highlight the text's environmental message. While the musically interlinked choirs sing of humanity's negligence towards nature in a series of dream images, the endearing and innocent tunes of the children's choir ultimately evoke a sense of hope for the future. Creating a unique opportunity for adult and children's choirs to collaborate, this captivating piece offers a fun and educational performance experience for singers both young and old.

Table of Contents:
6pm ; As if ; Yellow Eye ; Remember ; 9pm ; Green Rain ; Midnight ; We need ; 3am ; Sorry too late ; Peppermint freckles ; 6am (Lutra lutra) ; Perhaps

About the Author :
Bob Chilcott has become one of the world's most widely performed composers and arrangers of choral music. His compositional output reflects his wide taste in music styles and his commitment to writing music that is both singable and communicative. He has been involved in choral music most of his life he was a chorister and then a choral scholar in the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and was a member of the British vocal group The King's Singers for whom he made a number of popular arrangements of well-known songs from all genres. As well as being a full-time composer he is also a highly acclaimed choral conductor. He has been privileged to conduct many choirs all over the world. He is Principal Guest Conductor of The BBC Singers and in 2019 he was appointed Principal Conductor of Birmingham University Singers. His music has been widely recorded by many choirs and groups including The King's Singers, Tenebrae, and The BBC Singers.

Review :
The combination of Chilcott's inventive and emotionally vital choral writing with Bennett's masterful lyricism make The Angry Planet an incredibly significant anad timely work, its message encapsulated in its final words: "The seesaw lifts and dips as we wonder to ourselves: can we learn how to live with this world? Perhaps the sparrows sing, perhaps, perhaps" . Bob Chilcott's The Angry Planet caused a stir when it premiered at the Proms in 2012. A heartfelt cry for sense in the climate-change debate, its power lay in the simplicity of children's voices - tomorrow's adults and inheritors of the mess that today's generation is leaving for them. The challenge [Chilcott] set himself here was a daunting one; to compose a totally unaccompanied choral work, including children's voices, lasting over three-quarters of an hour. That takes some doing, for composer and performers alike; but he has managed it, largely by keeping the harmonic movement fairly limited, and securing variety by contrast of textures and motion . . . The result is a genuinely beautiful work, with an expressive intensity unmatched by more glitzy compositions. Chilcott has found in the poet Charles Bennett an ideal collaborator, and the poems are beautiful things in themselves . . . This work is a fine achievement, and simply adds to Bob Chilcott's profile as one of the most brilliant composers of vocal music around today. He is also a major ambassador for the simple undying joy of singing.