Robin Haigh’s TEARFLOODS: HOMAGE TO MIYAZAKI world premiere

Crouch End Festival Chorus, under the leadership of its Music Director David Temple, has a long history of commissioning new choral works. Its latest is Tearfloods (Homage to Miyazaki) by the award-winning British composer, Robin Haigh, which will receive its world premiere at Cadogan Hall on Sunday 19 April. Inspired by the “singular imagination” of the Japanese animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, Haigh has used the filmmaker’s work as a funnel for his own creativity to write Tearfloods, his first symphony and largest work to date. Haigh’s shorter piece, Driftwood, written for the London Symphony Orchestra in 2023, served as a sketch for Tearfloods, sharing much of the same harmonic, melodic and timbral DNA. In Tearfloods, Haigh imagines an alternative reality in which every tear that has ever been cried flows down beneath the earth, forming an immense, secret and ever-changing underground sea. He has imagined the piece as depicting a voyage across this sea by a solitary figure in a small vessel, where “my lonely protagonist might encounter warm, inviting waters made of tears cried with joy, icy and still waters from tears of total loneliness, vicious tempests from tears cried for those lost in war”. Tearfloods is scored for choir, wind and brass, keyboard, electric guitar, strings, and a large percussion section which includes a microtonal glockenspiel constructed by the composer and a tub of water for submerging a crotale. Joining the ensemble is the guitarist, Harrison White, playing the eight string Ormsby Goliath guitar in what is believed to be the first time such an instrument has featured in a symphony. Harrison White played with Haigh in their teens in a progressive mental band, Bleeding Oath, and now tours the world with the Norwegian band, Leprous. Also in the concert is Orff’s ever-popular cantata, Carmina Burana, performed here with two pianos and a rich spread of percussion taking the place of a full orchestra. It’s a delicious mix of innocence and bawdiness, and this performance promises an exhilarating ride, including the screeches of a roasting swan and the pleasures and perils of drinking, gambling and lust.