Hermione Roff

• Biography

  

  Hermione Roff has always been interested in music and singing. As a teenager she joined the local Choral Society alongside her mother and it was a high-light every Tuesday to go along and sing works like the Bach Passions and The Dream of Gerontius and music by composers like Britten and Faure ...
  
  Wherever she has lived she has always sought out a choir to sing with. She finds it a joy to sing about things she believes in and can enter into, in an emotional and intellectual way.
  
  As a composer, she has written several short pieces for choirs and also for special family occasions making use of whatever talent is available.
  
  Most of her working life has been spent as a Senior Research Therapist within Academic Child Mental Health services in the NHS. She lives and works in Lancaster.

  The Virgin's Song
  The Virgin's Song won a national competition earlier this year, and is one of a number of shorter works Roff has composed for choir. Roff aimed to capture the duality of the nativity scene, in a work she herself describes as 'both a lullaby and an indignant protest song'. Mary is full of tenderness for her young child, but angered by the circumstances of his birth and the poverty into which he has been born. The music echoes these strong emotions in the contrasting phrases of a sorrowful lullaby and the stronger harmonic sequences of protest. There is a similar juxtaposition of dynamic and tempi. In the end she quietly rocks and soothes her baby, in devotion and love and gratitude.

  More like this: Peter Warlock - Bethlehem Down
  The Marian heartbreak heard in Roff's carol also shades Warlock's slow, tender work, as the gifts presented to the swaddling infant become the tools of embalming.

• More Carols

  • David Briggs - Adam lay y-bounden
  • Carl Rütti - O patre unigenitas
  • Andrew Simpson - I saw three ships
  • arr Malcolm Archer - Angels from the realms of glory
  • Sir Richard Rodney Bennett - The Holly and the Ivy
  • Sir John Tavener - Cradle Song
  • arr Sir David Willcocks - I saw three ships
  • arr Bob Chilcott - Sussex Carol
  • Richard Lloyd - St Joseph's Carol
  • Francis Pott - Balulalow
  • Alexander Campkin - Sleep, holy babe
  • Bernard Hughes - I am Christmas
  • Peter Cornelius - The Three Kings
  • Kristina Araklyan - New Year