Award-winning Canadian composer Christopher Tyler Nickel’s penchant for imaginative combinations of instruments translates to his latest AVIE release, Music for Woodwind Choirs. Each movement of the “Suite for Two Oboes and Two Cors Anglais”, takes its title from four prayers in the Christian liturgy – Kyrie, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa, Gloria – each one an abstract representation of the overall spirit and sentiment of these devotions.

Christopher’s “Symphony for Flute Choir” is a larger scale work for four flutes, plus piccolo, alto and bass flutes, that embodies an emotional breadth on a symphonic scale. The Suite for Two Oboes and Two Cors Anglais (2017), consists of four movements that take their titles from the Christian liturgy. Each movement is an abstract representation of the overall spirit and emotion of each of these prayers. The movements consist of what I find to be four of the most poignant as well as contrasting of the prayers: the Kyrie, the Dies Irae, the Lacrimosa, and ending with the Gloria. Having played the oboe and English horn throughout my formative musical years through to my completion of university, I have an inherent love for these instruments and writing for them. Oboists lack a large selection of serious repertoire for choirs of their instruments, and my hope is that this piece will help fill some of that need in additional to encouraging others to write for this fascinating timbral combination.

The Symphony for Flute Choir (2017) is a larger scale work for standard flute choir consisting of four movements. In composing this piece, my goal was to give the flute choir a serious piece of music with the emotional breadth that comes in writing a piece of a symphonic scale. As with most of my music, there is no programme or narrative to this piece. Rather, the movements revolve around often angular ideas, many mixed asymmetric metres, and contrasts between slow, sometimes emotionally ambivalent sections and more driving and jagged movements of ever-increasing amounts of tension.