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Alone in Hamburg in January 2005, the poet James Fenton was bombarded by images from the Boxing Day tsunami. He tells how he came to write the lyrics for a commemorative piece of music
A few winters ago, I loaded up my car with books, papers and computer, and drove to Hamburg, arriving in the new year to take up a visiting fellowship: I was to finish a book. People who offer this kind of help to authors are in the habit of saying that the writer needs solitude and support in order to "confront his demons". I could well imagine, though, that these radical acts of self-dislocation - winter in Hamburg was pretty radical in this respect - are a way of conjuring up new, unsuspected demons. These furnished apartments, however pleasantly equipped (and mine was pleasant enough), put us in the position of the newly divorced: a new place to learn, a new life to devise, new absences.
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Dominic's piece, which will be performed this week at the Barbican in London, achieved his aims. He wanted to write a song sequence for the powerful theatrical voice of the Australian Philip Quast, to bring a distinguished performer from the musical theatre into the concert hall, and to give this kind of voice the chance to be heard with a symphony orchestra. This type of combination may be familiar enough from evenings when an orchestra "lets its hair down" and goes pop for a night. What is much less familiar is to find original and serious music written for such a combination. This is nothing to do with "crossover". It is more a matter of saying to musicians in the classical tradition: this kind of voice is a wonderful expressive instrument we ought to be using more often.
