On 25 October the Crouch End Festival Chorus and London Mozart Players perform Jessica Curry’s elegy Echo at Alexandra Palace, conducted by David Temple. The 17-minute work for chorus, orchestra and organ, setting the titular poem by Christina Rossetti, appears alongside Mozart’s Requiem and music by Christopher Tin, who like Curry is celebrated for his videogame soundtracks.
Curry wrote the work in 2020 as an elegy for her father, who she lost during the pandemic. It was commissioned by the Crouch End Festival, who premiered it with Temple and the LMP in October 2021. Curry writes of the piece,
I have always been drawn to the poetry of Christina Rossetti - her work contains a passion and a mystery that speaks to the kind of music I want to write…The poem has one of the most beautiful, extraordinarily redolent opening lines: “Come to me in the silence of a dream” - it’s so immediately evocative, so-otherworldly and so ripe for setting to music. It feels like a poem that straddles two worlds - where the living and the dead strive to meet and touch…
Writing the piece, she notes, “was also a balm to be able to process my futile longing to see my Dad”, who was in a hospice during lockdown. “The words held me and made me feel less alone…‘Speak low, lean low’ became a kind of mantra on the darkest days and forms the most tender section of the piece”, Curry writes. “Despite my profound sadness the piece has a hopeful centre which surprised me as I was writing – ‘Pulse for pulse and breath for breath’ pushes us into an as yet unwritten future with a strong, beating heart.”
On 8 October London Voices and Ben Parry perform So Let us Melt – an a cappella movement that features in her eponymous video game soundtrack, and which featured on the pandemic-inspired 2025 album Shielding Songs. The album explores themes of vulnerability, tenderness, tolerance, forgiveness, loss and love. It is Curry’s first album in five years and “probably the most personal music I’ve ever made”; the work’s title reflects Curry’s difficult experiences during the pandemic as an immunocompromised person and reflects her journey out of it; she discusses the creation of the record in The Guardian here.
Highlights from the record include settings of Home by Warsan Shire (the British poet championed by Beyoncé) and Kiss the Bairns, from The Durham Hymns, Curry’s collaboration with the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Close Mine Eyes, for saxophone and SATB voices, is dedicated to Curry’s late aunt Sue, who died during the pandemic, and is a musical response to Orlando Gibbons’ The Silver Swan.