NOT YET BORN (1985-6)
Short but powerful setting of Louis MacNeice's poem, Prayer Before Birth. This was the work commissioned as a result of winning the Guinness Prize in 1985. An unprepared huddle of various NFMS choirs were miraculously glued together by Brian Wright for the first and only (desperately inadequate) performance, with the excellent Wren Orchestra in February 1987, at Wembley Town Hall, north London.
Obviously the pink-spectacled organisers from London Borough of Brent thought that this 'little choral piece' could somehow be dropped into a mish-mash of a programme aimed at the average or less concert-goer. But it was certainly no venue or occasion for a composer having won a major international composers' competition intent on writing something of substance.
DURATION 16'
(Eschig)