Divine Art presents a stunning album of choral music from Northumberland-based composer John Casken, inspired by the region’s magnificent landscape and coastline, its changing colours, history, and poetry. The recording features Joyful Company of Singers under the direction of Peter Broadbent and reflects two years of working alongside the composer.

The album features evocative and powerful settings of poems by writers, from 7th-century Northumbrian cowherder Caedmon, to George Herbert, John Donne, Robert Burns, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Northumbrian poet Katrina Porteous, and John Casken himself.

The album contains many Northumbrian connections, especially in the works written for choirs in Durham and Northumberland, including the Choir of Durham Cathedral and Newcastle Cathedral, Northern Sinfonia Chorus, and the choir John Casken himself started – Coquetdale Chamber Choir.

The works are grouped around timeless and deeply resonant themes, the headings drawn from within their texts: Northumberland’s seascape and dialect are central to Uncertain Sea, the single work in ‘Far from Land’. The focus of ‘Sacred Shaper’ is Christianity in early times, followed by an Easter sequence ‘Stone and Thorn’ and finally music of farewell ‘Fare thee weel’. Stones also play a part, whether rolling on the sea bed, in memorials of stone, ‘the stone rolled away from Christ’s tomb’, or as an allegory for virtues symbolised in the stone floor of a church. The choir takes up various roles – sometimes as the voice of a community, or as voices coming together to offer reflection, or simply to tell a story through the music.

John Casken’s painting for the cover of this recording includes the stones of Dunstanburgh Castle bordering the seas; in Katrina Porteous’s words, ‘Black Dunstanburgh withstands/The waves, the years.’

John Casken (b. 1949) is one of the most distinctive composers of his generation. His works range through every genre and his is inspired by literature and legend as well as landscape and the visual arts. As a student in Warsaw, he formed a long association and close friendship with the leading Polish composer Witold Lutosławski. He has a close connection with a number of orchestras and ensembles, and his works are regularly performed in the UK, including the BBC Proms, and across the globe. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Britten Award, British Composer Award, and the Tippett Medal.