On 15 February Royal Northern Sinfonia, directed from the violin by Maria Włoszczowska, are joined by Sean Shibe for Cassandra Miller’s guitar concerto Chanter alongside works by Oliver Leith, Jonny Greenwood, and Thomas Adès.
The 20-minute piece is cast in four verses and a coda, played continuously: ‘Rippling’, ‘Bellow-breathing’, ‘Sleep-chanting’, ‘Slowing Air’ and a Coda, ‘Honey-dreaming’. The work is inspired by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, whose live performance of O Chiadain an Lo, recorded in Sligachan on the Isle of Skye, provided a key musical prompt for much of the work’s material and atmosphere. Though the original melody is from 1784, Chaimbeul arranged it for the small-pipes and transposed it into the Dorian mode. Miller discusses creating the work in The Guardian here, which saw composer and guitarist explore a process Miller calls ‘automatic singing’.
Chanter was premiered by Sean Shibe with Dunedin Consort in April 2024, with subsequent appearances at the Cheltenham Festival and De Bijloke, Ghent. In November 2024 Shibe toured the concerto with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Richard Tognetti; in 2025 it was shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society award and a Classical Ivor. The Royal Northern Sinfonia previously commissioned and premiered Miller’s Swim in 2023 with Dinis Sousa – a 17-minute work inspired by Robert Schumann and Anne Carson.
Preceding Chanter is Leith’s Honey Siren for strings, winner of the 2020 Ivors Composer Award in the Large Ensemble category. The 17-minute piece, cast in three movements, expresses Leith’s fascination with unconventional tunings and evocative sonorities. The work imagines the wailing sirens that pass into and out of earshot in the urban landscape; Leith transforms their see-sawing into melodic figures and textures that are by turns joyful and disconcerting. Following its premiere with 12 Ensemble, the work has been taken up by the Philharmonia Orchestra, Manchester Collective, and the Orchestre national d'Auvergne.
The concert opens with Greenwood’s Water, with RNS joined by tanpura player BISHI for its idiosyncratic instrumental set. Inspired by the closing lines of Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name from The Whitsun Weddings, the 18-minute piece is built from a whispering background of ostinato figures and patterns in the strings, against which a concertante group of two flutes and violin weave solo lines. This in turn is backed by an amplified upright piano doubling chamber organ or keyboard sampler, with the tanpura providing another harmonic and melodic underlay; their semi-improvised patters dovetail and diverge from the ensemble as the work unfolds.
Adès’ Shanty – Over the Sea is the penultimate work on the programme. An intricate 8-minute work strings, Shanty was the composer’s first essay in the medium. He calls it “a repetitive, communal ritual thing…designed to create a kind of protective mantra around people who are embarking on great peril…Embarkation…It is one of the most human desires: to go somewhere.” In 2025 Adès released his own account of the work with the Hallé Orchestra.