I spend most of my work life working with other people's music. The number of times I have had the 'dubious joy' of recording or conducting my own music is very small.....some Titles music for Royal Variety Shows, Choral pieces recorded by the BBC Choir of the Year Chantage, A Suite for String Orchestra, Oboe and Flute which I conducted for a Friday Night is Music Night with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2010, Miss World...anyway, you get the picture, compared to how much music written by other people that I work on the list is quite small. So today I spent the day recording Lament for the Innocents which originally was written as part of a Musical called The Rocky Crusades which my dear friend John Theakston and I wrote a few years ago. John has changed some of the lyrics and the idea is that we have now recorded this - and filmed it - with the intention of getting it 'out there' to try to help the plight of the international refugees. A small contribution but a heartfelt one. Melanie Marshall, Siobhan Athwal sang for me and I arranged the song for piano (me), double bass (Harrison Wood) and cor anglais (Rebecca Wood), with Tom Sandars filming and the session was engineered by Simon Allen at Resident Studios.
I still pinch myself when I hear brilliant people playing 'my' stuff, truly I still do, and they worked so amazingly in making it come to life. It is such a privilege doing what I do but sometimes it becomes an unbelievable honour and sometimes that 'dubious joy' is overwhelming and so it was today.
I hope to be able to report more on this soon - once we have some footage - but suffice to say the track itself I am really pleased with. So pleased with it it MUST have been written by someone else!