Presto Recordings of the Year
Finalist 2023

Kate Royal, Claire Booth (sopranos), Hugh Cutting (countertenor), Christopher Purves (bass-baritone), BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers, Hallé Choir, Ben Gernon, Vimbayi Kaziboni

Howard, Emily: The Anvil 'An Elegy for Peterloo'
Howard, Emily: Elliptics

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed. To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs – each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur – and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day? A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope.

"Howard’s musical style, jangly and adversarial, entirely suits her subject, the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, where troops charged into a crowd demanding voting reforms...The accompanying Howard vocal piece, Elliptics, is a little less winning, but offers more proof of a fiercely individual composing talent." - The Times, 27th September 2023.