BBC Music Magazine
March 2024
Choral & Song Choice
Ruby Hughes (soprano), Manchester Collective
Elias, B: Meet Me in the Green Glen
Shaw, C: Valencia
Vaughan Williams: Along the Field
Tavener: Akhmatova Songs
Dowland: Two Dowland Songs
trad.: Da Day Dawn
Ravel: Deux mélodies hébraïques: Kaddisch
Wallen: End of My Days
Debussy: Trois chansons de Bilitis
Mahler: Urlicht (Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
Pritchard, Deborah: Peace
The inspiration for this album came about from Ruby Hughes’ first collaboration with the Manchester Collective in the spring of 2020. During the first Covid lockdown, they built the programme of this recital for the purpose of touring the UK and uplifting their audiences at a time when we were all being confronted by challenging notions of mortality and isolation. As artists, they asked themselves what music might attend to the prevailing concerns of this time. Their answers came in the form of this offering. The title of this album, End of My Days, comes from Errollyn Wallen’s song; a resounding celebration of life that embraces death without regret or sadness but with great verve and acceptance. The other songs, each in its own way, evoke silence and separation, but also love and hope and even the reassurance that we will return whence we came and light shall lift us into eternity. The concluding song, Deborah Pritchard’s Peace, is a message of hope, willingly received as the world emerged out of lockdown in 2021. Luminous tranquillity moves us into the light, towards eternity.
"Imaginative, sensitive programming has been a constant feature of Ruby Hughes’s collaborations; and this latest with the perennially adventurous Manchester Collective is no exception...A disc to concentrate the mind and enfold the soul." - BBC Music Magazine, March 2024
