I Have Seen the Last Rays (Roundhay)
Welcome!
The Guild archives tell me the last time we performed here in the magnificent St Edmund’s Church, Roundhay, was in June 2007. Of course, the choir has changed significantly since then: for one, we are about double in number! It is a tremendous privilege to be back performing in one of the finest buildings in the region, and we hope our programme exploring the legacy of Blake, Brontë and Goethe (plus others) through musical settings of their great works is a worthy offering of renewal. Thank you for joining us for this performance, and thanks to the leadership of St Ed’s for having us back.
After the concert, please send us your feedback by going to the webpage on the back. You can scan the QR code on your smartphone if you feel confident doing so. We appreciate all your comments and would love to be able to stay in touch and tell you about our future concerts.
— Laura Barker-Bey (Chair of Leeds Guild of Singers)
Programme notes and texts
Sing Matthew Oglesby (born 1987)
Sing was commissioned by the Guild for our 70th anniversary in 2018. The text was written specially by Leeds-based poet Hannah Stone and celebrates the feelings and textures of life in Yorkshire, combined with the joy of choral singing. The piece is scored for true 8-part choir, with harmonies and melodies that exploit the full range of the ensemble. Listen out for the sounds of the curlew, rushing water, the expanse of the sky and echoes of textile mills and Jerusalem.
Around the same time, Hannah and Matthew also wrote a requiem together entitled Penthos, which was premiered by the St Peter’s Singers of Leeds in November 2018 as part of the City of Leeds’s commemoration of the centenary of the end of the First World War. In November 2025 Matthew premiered a new original musical comedy at Yeadon Town Hall Theatre called Devil May Care, with a story derived from recently re-discovered Bavarian folk tales.
Text:
Sing for yourself,
when the words have escaped,
but the tune won’t go away.
Sing the curlew and lark,
the purling stream and rocky fell,
the scurrying clouds and sleety rain.
Sing the rhythm of walking,
through the city at night,
where stars ride high above the streetlights.
Sing with a friend,
sing unison chord from concord spun,
weaving fresh harmony from threads diverse.
Hymn those mills reborn,
after their bustling heyday,
new life in sturdy old stone.
Sing to a stranger
whose ear is cheered
by hearing music instead of just noise.
Sing with your heart and voice,
sing from your lungs and guts,
sing through your grief and sing again for joy.
Dress up in black and sing for a crowd,
sing on a whim,
but sing out loud.
The Lamb Sir John Tavener (1944-2013)
Tavener’s best-known choral piece is built on a seven-note opening motif that is then combined with an exact inversion of itself. The resulting bitonality produces a dissonance that periodically resolves in contrasting sections, where the simplicity and beauty of the four-part harmony reflects the innocence and purity of new birth.
Text:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee;
He is call’d by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek and he is mild,
He became a little child.
I, a child, and thou, a lamb,
We are call’d by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
The Gallant Weaver Sir James Macmillan (born 1959)
A leading figure in contemporary British music, MacMillan is renowned for his deeply expressive choral writing that draws on Scottish folk traditions and his Catholic faith. “The Gallant Weaver” sets Robert Burns’s tender love poem in a setting that captures both the folk simplicity of the verse and the emotional complexity beneath its surface. MacMillan’s harmonic language shifts between modal purity and more adventurous chromaticism, whilst his rhythmic vitality brings Burns’s text vividly to life. The piece demonstrates his gift for creating music that is both immediately accessible and richly sophisticated in its craft.
Text:
Where Cart rins rowin’ to the sea,
By mony a flow’r and spreading tree,
There lives a lad, the lad for me,
He is the gallant Weaver.
I love my gallant Weaver.
Oh I had wooers aught or nine,
They gied me rings and ribbons fine,
And I was feared my heart would tine,
And I gied it to the Weaver.
I love my gallant Weaver.
My daddie sign’d my tocher-band
To gie the lad that has the land,
But to my heart I’ll add my hand,
And give it to the Weaver.
I love my gallant Weaver.
While birds rejoice in leafy bowers
While bees delight in op’ning flowers
While corn grows green in simmer showers,
I love my gallant Weaver.
Four Shakespeare Songs Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (born 1963)
Mäntyjärvi is a freelance translator, composer, choral singer and conductor. He is one of Finland’s internationally best-known composers of choral music, with a catalogue of some 150 works published to date. As a composer he describes himself as an eclectic traditionalist, adopting influences from a number of styles and periods, and basing his musical idiom largely on traditionally oriented materials. This collection of settings of contrasting texts from Shakespeare’s plays was composed in 1984 and is striking for the unusual vocal effects the singers use in the third to create the air of the supernatural around the scene.
Text:
1. Come Away, Death
(from Twelfth Night II:4)
Come away, come away, Death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it.
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown.
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
A thousand, thousand sighs to save,
Lay me O where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there.
2. Lullaby
(from A Midsummer Night’s Dream II:2)
You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen.
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong:
Come not near our fairy queen.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby:
Lulla, lulla, lullaby,
Lulla, lulla, lullaby.
Never harm nor spell nor charm
Come our lovely lady nigh.
So, good night, with lullaby.
Weaving spiders, come not here.
Hence, you long-legged spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby,
Lulla, lulla, lullaby.
3. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
(from Macbeth IV:1)
Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whin’d.
Harpier cries: ‘Tis time, ‘tis time.
Round about the cauldron go,
In the poison’d entrails throw:
Toad that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom, sleeping got,
Boil thou first in the charmed pot.
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake
In the cauldron boil and bake,
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog.
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing.
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock, digg’d in dark.
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips.
Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-delivered by a drab.
Make the gruel thick and slab.
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For ingredients for our cauldron
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks, whoever knocks!
4. Full Fathom Five
(from The Tempest I:2)
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes –
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
Hark! now I hear them: Ding, dong, bell.
Her Sacred Spirit Soars Eric Whitacre (born 1970)
Grammy award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is among today’s most popular musicians. A graduate of The Juilliard School, his works are performed worldwide, and his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united well over 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries. This piece, commissioned for a thriving Shakespearean festival, uses a 14-line sonnet by the modern poet Silvestri and is effectively a canon for double choir. The acrostic text, where the first letter of each line spells out “Hail Fair Oriana”, is a tribute to the virgin Queen Elizabeth I, who was often referred to in the arts as Oriana.
Text:
Her sacred spirit soars o’er gilded spires,
And breathes into creative fires a force;
In well-tuned chants and chords of countless choirs,
Lives ever her immortal shadowed source.
From age to age the roll of poets grows,
And yet, a lonely few are laurel-crowned,
In whose sweet words her inspiration shows,
Revealing insights deep and thoughts profound.
O shall Cecelia, or shall Goddess Muse
Reach then to me across eternal skies?
Is heaven’s quick’ning fire but a ruse,
Abiding rather here before mine eyes?
Nearer than I dream’d is she whose fame
All poets sing, whose glory all proclaim:
“LONG LIVE FAIR ORIANA!”
Interval
Adoro Te Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937)
A prolific, French, late-Romantic composer, Bonis wrote more than 300 pieces, including works for piano, organ and orchestra, as well as chamber and choral music. Despite her indisputable talents as a composer, she was a victim of the gender prejudice of her time and this piece was only published 61 years after her death. In two sections and with a simple four-part homophonic texture, the piece beautifully reflects her deep religious convictions and the power of love.
Text:
Adoro te, supplex, adoro te, latens Deitas
Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit
Quia te contemplans totum deficit. Adoro te.
O memoriale mortis Domini
Panis vivus, vitam præstans homini
Præsta meæ menti de te vivere
Et te illi semper dulce sapere.
Jesu, quem velatum, nunc aspicio
Oro fiat illud, quod tam sitio
Ut, te revelata cernens facie
Visu sim beatus tuæ gloriæ. Amen.
Translation:
I devoutly adore you, hidden deity,
Who are truly hidden beneath these appearances.
My whole heart submits to you, because in contemplating you, it is fully deficient. I adore you.
O memorial of our Lord’s death,
Living Bread that gives life to man,
Grant my soul to live on you,
And always to savour your sweetness.
Jesus, whom now I see hidden,
I ask you to fulfil what I so desire:
That the sight of your face being unveiled, I may have the happiness of seeing your glory. Amen.
The Night is Darkening Round Me Tõnu Kõrvits (born 1969)
A leading Estonian composer, Kõrvits’s music transports us along “hypnotic journeys through the landscapes of nature and folk tradition, human soul and subconscious”. This piece is a setting of a poem by Emily Brontë, the Yorkshire novelist and poet best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Kõrvits divides the voices into as many as eight separate parts combined with a solo alto. The work takes the form of a dialogue between the soloist and the choir, where different fragments of the text and melody are developed and echoed back, weaving into a complex overlapping texture of sound.
Alto solo: Katie Woollam
Text:
The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me, And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending, and yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me, wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me; I will not, cannot go.
The little boy Lost The little boy Found Benjamin Kirk (MD of LGS)
William Blake was born in 1757 in Soho. At the age of eight he saw “a tree filled with angels” on Peckham Rye, their bright wings “bespangling every bough like stars.” His visionary gifts as a poet, painter and engraver never left him, and when he died in 1827 in a two-room garret, he was singing.
My brother Barnabas bought me a beautiful edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience at Christmas 2012, complete with Blake’s paintings engraved and framing each poem therein (if you haven’t seen these beautiful paintings, do search them out). The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found are separate poems in Blake’s book, but the first poem ends without punctuation, and the next poem begins directly where the last one left off. When I began setting this in 2013, I wanted the music to reflect this transition into the second poem, which completes the first. The music is Romantic, and I was trying with this to relay the trouble which the Little Boy finds himself in during the first poem — and then the sense of delivery and salvation at the end of the innocent boy’s journey.
— Benjamin Kirk
Text:
Father, father, where are you going
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there
The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, and the child did weep
And away the vapour flew.
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand’ring light,
Began to cry, but God ever nigh,
Appear’d like his father in white.
He kissed the child and by the hand led,
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale thro’ the lonely dale,
Her little boy weeping sought.
Lullabye for Lucy Sir Peter Maxwell Davies MBE (1934-2016)
Written in 1981 for unaccompanied SATB chorus, this charming work sets George Mackay Brown’s acrostic poem celebrating the birth of Lucy Randall, the first child born in Rackwick, Hoy, for 32 years. Maxwell Davies set himself the unusual constraint of using only white notes on the piano, creating a modal simplicity that serves as a ‘symbolic conceit’. The music has a gentle rocking rhythm entirely suitable for its lullaby purpose, and the composer enjoyed the tune so much he repeated all the text to hear it twice. This tender work reveals a softer side to Maxwell Davies’s compositional voice, demonstrating his gift for combining technical ingenuity with direct emotional appeal.
Text:
Let all the plants and creatures of the valley now
Unite,
Calling a new
Young one to join the celebration.
Rowan and lamb and waters salt and sweet,
Entreat the
New child to the brimming
Dance of the valley,
A pledge and a promise.
Lonely they were long, the creatures of Rackwick, till
Lucy came among them, all brightness and light.
It will not shine again Aurélien Hallopeau (b.1995)
Using melancholic melodies and dissonances, It will not shine again depicts the bleak emotional landscape of Emily Brontë’s poem and the image of a once‑bright light fading away. Whether this dimming sun is literal or symbolic, the piece offers a meditation on loss and sorrow, with a sense of resignation.
— Aurélien Hallopeau
Text:
It will not shine again;
Its sad course is done;
I have seen the last ray wane
Of the cold, bright sun.
Talismane Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Written in 1849, this is the last choral song from a set of four by this German composer whose
compositions embraced virtually all of the genres and formats of his day, but whose personal life was
marked by great struggle and tragedy. Schumann’s setting of Goethe’s text is for double choir and
shows considerable variety of texture, almost as though he is using the voice parts as orchestral
instruments. From the highly rhythmic, three-in-a-bar, mainly homophonic opening section, we
progress to a much more contrapuntal and chromatic motif (“wandering may lead me astray”). And
then he gradually builds the tension and texture until the final section, which returns to the emphatic
opening phrases and blends them into a glorious 20-bar “Amen” finale.
Text:
Gottes ist der Orient!
Gottes ist der Okzident!
Nord und südliches Gelände
Ruht im Frieden seiner Hände.
Er, der einzige Gerechte,
Will für jedermann das Rechte.
Sei von seinen hundert Namen
Dieser hochgelobet! Amen.
Mich verwirren will das Irren,
Doch du weisst mich zu entwirren,
Wenn ich handle, wenn ich dichte,
Gib du meinem Weg die Richte!
Gottes ist der Orient!
Gottes ist der Okzident!
Amen!
God is the East!
God is the West!
Northern and southern lands
Rest in the peace of his hands.
He, the only righteous one,
Desires what is right for everyone.
Of his hundred names,
May this one be highly praised! Amen.
Wandering may lead me astray,
But you know how to untangle me,
When I act, when I write,
Guide me on my way!
God is the East!
God is the West!
Amen!
Programme notes by Lindsay Robertshaw and Benjamin Kirk, texts and translations by David Jackson
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Enjoyed this music?
Want to hear it again? We’re performing the same programme on 5 July 2026 at St George’s Hall, Bradford, as part of the Bradford Literary Festival. You can find a link to buy tickets on our website.
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Save the dates: our concerts in 2026
Sunday 5 July 2026 — Bradford Literature Festival performance at St George’s Hall, Bradford, 4pm
Saturday 31 October 2026 — DESTINY: interrupted, a cappella existential horror for Halloween, St Michael’s, Headingley, 7.30pm
Sunday 13 December 2026 — Carol concert at St John’s Church, Adel, 3pm
Saturday 19 December 2026 — Christmas concert at St Chad’s, Headingley (time TBC)
Did you know?
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Benjamin Kirk — Musical Director
Benjamin Kirk (b.1992) was born in Beverley, East Yorkshire, to missionary parents. He spent his early years in Portugal, Brazil, and the United States, before falling in love with choral music while a chorister at Ripon Cathedral. After leaving Christ’s Hospital School in 2011, Benjamin moved to Tallinn, Estonia to begin studying Choral Conducting under Tõnu Kaljuste, at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Benjamin won 3rd Prize in the 2019 World Choral Conducting Competition in Hong Kong, and is now Musical Director of The Purcell Singers, the Lea Singers in Harpenden, and Sine Nomine International Touring Choir.
Since 2021 Benjamin has been Guest Conductor with the National Forum of Music (NFM) Choir in Wrocław, Poland, in a budding international career: Benjamin has also worked with the Estonian National Male Choir (2014/2016), the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (2016/2018), the Swedish Radio Choir (2018), and the French Radio Choir (2019).
Outside of conducting, Benjamin enjoys playing chess, watching stand-up comedy and reading.
Leeds Guild of Singers
Founded in 1948, Leeds Guild of Singers has established a reputation as one of Yorkshire’s finest chamber choirs and is a group of around 40 singers which prides itself on a light, flexible and pure sound. We perform a wide and adventurous repertoire of sacred and secular music, mostly unaccompanied and spanning seven centuries. We also support new music and our most recent commission Songs of Sleep and Prophecy, written by Martin Suckling, was made in memory of David Eaves, who was a member of the Guild for many years.
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