Saturday, 14 February 2026 - 7:30pm

The Great Hall . . .

Cornerstone Building

Liverpool Hope University

Creative Campus

17 Shaw Street

Liverpool

L6 1HP

Hope Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Stephen Pratt

Hope Metropolitan Singers, Richard Lea, Director

Programme:

Robin Hartwell: Over **


Unaccompanied pieces for choir including:
     Rameau: Hymn à la Nuit


Carulli: Guitar Concerto Op.140


Lully/Stephen Pratt: Little Suite
Durante: Magnificat
Malipiero: Vivaldiana
**Composer Notes

Robin Hartwell

Over

The orchestral piece Over (1989/90) . Over was written in memory of my father and is a companion piece to Untitled written on memory of my mother. They share the same background features.

I was struck by the oddity of the word ‘Overture’ in English. It is used for a short piece at the start of a concert or opera. There does not seem to be much ’over’ about it – it is a ‘starter’ more than a than ‘finisher’.

My short piece Over could be done as an overture, but because of the very certain cadence at the end it does feel like that loses something. Probably better ending something rather than opening.

The second meaning is to do with the finality of losing my father. My mother died years before, and this death meant selling the family home. I lost links to my past boyhood, alongside conversations with my father.

The work has six contrasting movements, so one could characterise the slower movements as mourning, or reflecting on this loss. Perhaps one could even imagine that each of movements was one of my responses to the unique event. So ‘being cheerful’ is another response.

Closer to the truth of the matter is that ‘over’ is a term in cricket, in which six balls are bowled. Both my father and I followed cricket with interest, though not with burning obsession.

This led me to have what seems to be a false memory which underpins this piece. My recollection was of last over in a test match which had drifted into being a certain draw. There were too few balls left for the batsmen to be bowled out, and too many runs for the batsmen to score. The bowler of the last over had nothing to win or lose.

Amusing:

He then did a very amusing thing: he imitated the bowling style of six of the players in the match. The spin bowler was twisted and contorted. One had an absurdly long run up - surely Bob Willis, with the odd way he held his hand behind his back and so on. This is my last movement. Each ball was done in a different way and the players were easily identified. It was very amusing. For this reason most of the sections end with a clear cadence. One can take this either as the ball being released and hitting the ground (or even the wicket). Or, alternatively, it is the response of the batsman, who might block the ball or give it a thwak. The very last chord is such a moment. I always imagine the ball going high for six runs, but it can also be heard as a wild swing of the bat as the ball flattens the six stumps. Neither is win or lose, even if the meaning points that way.

Research has revealed little evidence for such an event. It looks like I gradually made up the story over the course of the years.

I thought my father would be amused by this six-movement background. He was a great believer in concentrating on the comic things on life, and not dwelling on unsolvable problems and difficulties. The last chord of the piece I think of as an attempt at a six. A final whack for the close of the match. But pointless, and just for the fun of it it might also be the flying of the stumps. Both are amusing outcomes.

***

Eleanor Kelly

Eleanor Kelly has extensive experience as a performer and notable engagements include Palacio del Portalet (Spain), Kings Place, London (UK), and Finding A Voice festival (Ireland), where she was Artist-in-Residence. In 2021, she was selected as an International Guitar Foundation Young Artist and made her London debut as part of the scheme and premièred works commissioned by IGF for her. In 2020, she performed at Uppsala Internationella Gitarrfestival (Sweden) after being awarded a EuroStrings Scholarship.

A highly skilled and engaging performer who is not afraid to explore the drama and emotion of music
Hastings Independent Press

A passionate advocate for music by women composers, Eleanor specialises in lesser- known repertoire by both historical and contemporary women. She gave the Irish and British première of Claudia Montero's Latin Grammy award-winning guitar concerto Luces y Sombras in 2023 and 2019, respectively. In March 2026, Eleanor will release her debut album with Pixaudio, a landmark recording of works by the Argentine composer Carmen Guzmán.

In 2021, Eleanor graduated from the prestigious Máster en Interpretación de Guitarra Clásica course at Universidad de Alicante, Spain, where she studied with the world's foremost guitarists, and in 2024 she gained a Distinction in her MMus from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Notes:

Of all the ‘periods’ of classical music, the Baroque seems to have proved one of the most fertile grounds for composers since – finding its way into popular music (for example Procol Harum’s A whiter shade of pale, and The Farm’s Altogether now), jazz (Jacques Loussier’s many reworkings of Bach) and even hip-hop versions of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus. Hence the title of this programme - Baroque and Beyond. Despite the presence of names like Lully and Rameau in our Box of Delights, the programme only includes one work in the form in which it was written in the baroque period (c.1650-1750). That work is the four-part version of Durante’s Magnificat – and although the date of composition is unclear it was almost certainly composed in the first quarter of the C18th.

So what about the rest? The touching melody of Rameau’s Hymne à la nuit is certainly his - taken from his 1733 opera Hippolyte et Aricie - but the words were added by Edouardo Sciortino (1893- 1979) and the melody harmonised by Joseph Noyon (1888-1962). The piece was popularised following its appearance in the film La Cage aux Rossignols (The Nightingale Cage) in 1945.

The Carulli Guitar Concerto was first published in 1820. The style of the writing and the orchestration belong more to the early classical period, but the three-movement shape is very much a product of the baroque period. Indeed, the three-movement concerto is one of the innovations from the baroque period that survived well into the C20th.

The Lully and Malipiero works both take themes and harmonies from their originals, but rework them to different degrees. Malipiero came across the themes by Vivaldi that he employed in Vivaldiana following his editing of the composer’s works in the early 1950s. His approach is not dissimilar to Stravinsky’s use of Pergolesi’s music for his ballet Pulcinella. For my reworking (largely rescoring) of the extracts from the Lully opera, the approach has been somewhat more conservative – but there are a few sneaky additions!

Finally, in a late addition to this programme the orchestra is reprising a short work by Robin Hartwell which we first performed in 1990. After studies at Reading and Sussex Universities, Robin relocated to Merseyside in the mid-1980s to take up teaching posts at the University of Liverpool and later Liverpool Hope. Over is one of many new works the orchestra has premiered since it was formed, and tonight we hear a revised version that Robin made last year.

Stephen Pratt

Ticket Prices*

General Admission: £13.20


Liverpool Hope University current staff and students: Free


Family (2 adults plus children): £26.40


School or college students: £3.30


*Includes booking fee