Uploaded August 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Priaulx Rainier - The Bee Oracles (1969)
James Oxley (tenor)
Members of the Psappha Ensemble:
Conrad Marshall - flute
Rachael Clegg - oboe
Richard Casey - harpsichord
Benedict Holland - violin
Jennifer Langridge Cello
Mark Heron (conductor)
“Rainier and [Elisabeth] Lutyens admired one another, perhaps for features they shared: independence and determination. In other respects they were unalike. Rainier worked slowly, producing a new work, usually on a small scale, every couple of years. Perhaps because of that, her music seems intensively woven; it is certainly intensively pulsed.
She wrote this work, setting a poem by Edith Sitwell, ‘The Bee-Keeper’, for Peter Pears to sing at the 1969 Aldeburgh Festival. Her choice of accompanying ensemble – flute and oboe, violin and cello, harpsichord – may have been influenced by a work by a composer she admired, Elliott Carter’s Sonata for four of these instruments (omitting the violin). But equally, the bright sharpness of high woodwinds, the glide of the strings and the buzz of the harpsichord, to mention only some of the qualities she draws from this group, all fit the gilded magic of the poem and of its apian subject.
Introducing a broadcast of the work, Rainier mentioned how it is based on two parallel rhythms, one in the vocal line, the other created by the instruments in short patterns to counter or support the vocal rhythm, these producing ‘a honeycomb of sound’. Within that honeycomb, the moments of congruity, when instrumental attacks are lined up to coincide with a sung note, have a particular force.
At the same time, Rainier takes up the poem’s invitation to generate a broad-gauge honeycomb, of formal segments, with each of the different elements given its own variation, the whole interleaved with variations on the opening ‘Incantation’. The result, at once intricate chamber composition and spell, is fascinating, and yet this work, too, has not been heard since 1983.”
(Paul Griffiths, 2013)
Priaulx Rainier - The Bee Oracles (1969)
James Oxley (tenor)
Members of the Psappha Ensemble:
Conrad Marshall - flute
Rachael Clegg - oboe
Richard Casey - harpsichord
Benedict Holland - violin
Jennifer Langridge Cello
Mark Heron (conductor)
“Rainier and [Elisabeth] Lutyens admired one another, perhaps for features they shared: independence and determination. In other respects they were unalike. Rainier worked slowly, producing a new work, usually on a small scale, every couple of years. Perhaps because of that, her music seems intensively woven; it is certainly intensively pulsed.
She wrote this work, setting a poem by Edith Sitwell, ‘The Bee-Keeper’, for Peter Pears to sing at the 1969 Aldeburgh Festival. Her choice of accompanying ensemble – flute and oboe, violin and cello, harpsichord – may have been influenced by a work by a composer she admired, Elliott Carter’s Sonata for four of these instruments (omitting the violin). But equally, the bright sharpness of high woodwinds, the glide of the strings and the buzz of the harpsichord, to mention only some of the qualities she draws from this group, all fit the gilded magic of the poem and of its apian subject.
Introducing a broadcast of the work, Rainier mentioned how it is based on two parallel rhythms, one in the vocal line, the other created by the instruments in short patterns to counter or support the vocal rhythm, these producing ‘a honeycomb of sound’. Within that honeycomb, the moments of congruity, when instrumental attacks are lined up to coincide with a sung note, have a particular force.
At the same time, Rainier takes up the poem’s invitation to generate a broad-gauge honeycomb, of formal segments, with each of the different elements given its own variation, the whole interleaved with variations on the opening ‘Incantation’. The result, at once intricate chamber composition and spell, is fascinating, and yet this work, too, has not been heard since 1983.”
(Paul Griffiths, 2013)
