Description
On 27th March 2026, Prima Facie releases the premiere recording of Andrew Downes' A St Luke Passion with The Philharmonia and Philharmonia Voices conducted by David Trippett. Commissioned by the Wolverhampton Civic Choir in 1993 to be performed alongside Britten's 1948 Cantata St Nicolas, Downes' A St Luke Passion is the centre piece of the album which includes several a capella works. This is the first album in a trilogy of recordings of the large-scale choral works of Midlands composer Andrew Downes (1950-2023), who spent his entire life in Birmingham and the rural Midlands. Downes' lyrical gift places him squarely in the Late Romantic English tradition as a successor to Howells, his teacher. Downes loved the "smooth, timeless quality" of plainsong, and in particular the contrapuntal works of Palestrina and Monteverdi, whose freer approach to instrumentation provided inspiration for his St Luke Passion, which was scored for choir, tenor soloist, keyboard, percussion and strings. Swinging from Bernstein-like exuberance to African-inspired rhythmic passages, Downes finds an unexpected unity with ancient ecclesiastical music to create a message of communion across musical styles, eras and places in his St Luke Passion.
