To aid our thoughts and prayers in the aftermath of the atrocity that took place in Salisbury on March 2018, we are releasing a recording we made at The House of The Open Door in 2014. Banks of the Green Willow, by George Butterworth, is one of this country’s most loved pieces of music, taking its inspiration from folk-music he collected in the early years of the twentieth century.
The peaceful opening evokes the ancient and rolling green meadows around Salisbury. At a certain moment, though, the pastoral idyll is shattered by a deeply agitated ‘shriek’ – and the emergence of a much more sombre mood that captures for us the crisis that has struck this much loved cathedral city. The piece ends with a somewhat hesitant return to the lyrical mood of the opening.
Mike Halliday is the clarinettist and Nicola Gerrard the flautist.
We have previously released the second part of this music in a Sound Cloud we wrote to help us pray for people who find themselves caught up in the swirl of desperate situations: Pounding thoughts and desperate needs. See
https://ruachmin.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/pounding-thoughts-and-desperate-needs/