It’s hard to imagine a link between John Rutter and George Shearing. Rutter is the doyen of British choral composers, whose many anthems and carols invariably delight and uplift us. Shearing was a renowned jazz pianist who as a performer, arranger and composer of such numbers as Lullaby of Birdland, achieved great popularity with his Quintet in the States and beyond after the Second World War . Yet Shearing had wider musical interests and accepted a commission to write Music to Hear (1985) – a cycle of Shakespeare settings for choir, piano and double bass. Rutter spent some time in the USA, where the two met and evidently hit it off, as Rutter wrote his Birthday Madrigals (1995) to celebrate Shearing’s 75th birthday, which has echoes of Shearing’s earlier piece with words from Shakespeare and his contemporaries and influences of madrigal, part-song as well as jazz. When it came to another commission, Shearing repeated the format of Shakespeare settings in Songs and Sonnets (1999) and Rutter was there to conduct the première. It’s great to hear these three pieces together, with each composer stretching outside his usual boundaries.
The choral pieces will be interspersed with jazz standards including George Gershwin’s three Preludes played by Anita D’Attellis and jazz numbers realised by our conductor Steven Grahl and Steve Kershaw on the double-bass.
