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Gethsemani Fragment
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String Orchestra
Michael Berkeley
Gethsemani Fragment
Conductor's score and parts on hire
978-0-19-362054-4 24 January 1991
Price:
Available on request
for string orchestra
Forces or Category
String Orchestra
Duration
10 minutes
Difficulty
Difficult
Programme Notes
Music for string orchestra has played a significant part in Michael Berkeley's list of compositions. It was his
Meditations for String Orchestra
that won the composer the Guinness Prize for composition in 1977, and it was that piece and the
Concerto for Strings
that first brought critical attention to Berkeley's music. More recently
Coronach
(1988), which is based on a Scottish highland lament, has begun to be widely played, and
Gethsemane Fragment
(written for the New English Orchestra and first performed by them in 1991) might be seen as its companion piece, both pieces being about eight minutes long and dealing with various aspects of grief.
The commission for
Gethsemane Fragment
required the composer to take a biblical passage as his starting point and Berkeley recalled how, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ was overwhelmed with sorrow and torment and asked "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."
"I chose this passage", Berkeley says, because it seemed to me that at Gethsemane we see Christ at his most human, revealing a frailty that is all the more moving for its being a flash of weakness with which we can all identify. But combined with the human foreboding is the additional and awful visionary knowledge of what is in store. My piece, while abstract rather than programmatic, simply attempts to capture a brief glimpse of the gnawing and nagging doubts racing through the mind of Christ. One does not, I think, have to be religious to identify with this touching moment.
© Oxford University Press
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
Michael Berkeley
(b.1948)
Michael Berkeley was born in 1948. He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Michael's music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world's finest musicians. Most of Michael's significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas are available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. For ten years from 1995 Michael was artistic director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. He currently presents Radio 3's Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild's Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and is Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet.
Michael Berkeley at the BBC
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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