• Emily Howard
  • The Anvil (2019)
    (An Elegy for Peterloo)

  • Peters Edition Limited (World)

Commissioned by the BBC Radio 3 and Manchester International Festival.

First performed by Kate Royal (soprano), Christopher Purves (baritone) and the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers, Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir and Hallé Ancoats Community Choir, conducted by Ben Gernon at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on 7th July 2019. First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 16th August 2019, the 200th Anniversary of Peterloo.

  • S,bbar + mixedchchbrch; 3(III:pic).3.3(III:bcl).3(III:cbn)/5.3.2+btbn.1/timp.3perc/str
  • chamber choir, youth choir, SATB chorus
  • Soprano, Bass Baritone
  • 40 min
  • Michael Symmons Roberts

Programme Note

The Anvil is about the universal longing for suffrage, protest, liberty. It takes as its starting-point the 1819 Peterloo massacre in Manchester, England. A wide range of choral forces and soloists enabled Emily to conjure the complex web of voices in a mass protest, held together by the soprano as narrator, plus bass-baritone and choirs as one or many voices from the crowd and hustings. Musical influences for the score ranged from early 19th Century hymn tunes to the power and terror of mill machinery.

The idea of Michael making a large grid or woven text as part of the libretto came when we began to research Peterloo and found the repeated occupation ‘weaver’ in inventories of the dead and injured. The finished text was not meant to be read only in a straightforward linear way – though it can be – but also as a vertical and horizontal ‘weave’. Like the protesting crowds it evokes, it contains multiple voices and registers, from lists of injuries to slogans on banners, declarations of political will to shouts of protest, prayers to cries for help and snippets of stories.

This huge ‘Anvil Grid’ became a starting-point and resource for Emily’s music, but we felt another kind of text was needed, one with a narrative thread. So Michael wrote ‘The Stones of Peterloo’ and that became the spine of the piece. Why the title? We chose it partly because the scrap ground where Peterloo took place was anvil-shaped, but mainly because of its resonances with work being done, with futures being forged. The Anvil is, we hope, a universal cry for suffrage and democracy.

Emily Howard and Michael Symmons Roberts

Media

The Anvil recorded by BBC Philharmonic, Halle Choir, Ben Gernon (Delphian)

Scores

Reviews

This is an immensely impressive piece. It is visceral in the sense of pure (often percussive) impact; it certainly packs a punch. It is also carefully constructed ("Weave"; "RISE"; The Order Comes"; "Some of Our Cry is Their Cry”) and beautifully scored, but most of all there is a consistent level of inspiration here.

Colin Clarke, Classical Explorer
16th February 2024

“the first choral entry reminds me of the opening chorus of J S Bach's St John's Passion ... This is a very powerful work, and all the forces are used very effectively in this evocative and quite compelling piece. It is unashamedly contemporary music, but I have found it one of the most original and fascinating works I have listened to in some time. There is a lot of contrast, with hymns, slogans, marching tunes, industrial sound and rapid changes of mood, and the assembled forces have done a splendid job in delivering a rather startling performance … it showcases a composer who is a powerful voice, and one whose music, I believe, will stand the test of time.”

Geoff Pearce, Classical Music Daily - CD Spotlight
10th October 2023

Reviews “The Anvil (2019) unfolds a dramatic concept with graphic import. Subtitled ‘An Elegy for Peterloo’, this bicentennial commemoration brings vast (amateur and professional) forces into the multi-layered reimagining of that anvil-shaped ground on which the events took place […] the visceral depiction of the massacre and the numbed evoking of its aftermath are powerfully realised in music whose distinctive qualities ought to ensure this piece outlasts its immediate purpose.” Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone, September 2021 "

 

Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone
1st September 2021

"… the bone shaking force of Emily Howard’s climactic musical commission, [The Anvil], written for the full blast of the BBC Philharmonic, two soloists, the BBC Singers and three Hallé choirs. All 325 performers, topped off by the conductor Ben Gernon, handled its 36 minutes extraordinarily well. Michael Symmons Roberts supplied the texts, some compiled from a word grid extracted from contemporary reports of the massacre, others fused into pungent lines of poetry, conveyed by the soprano Kate Royal with unflinching eloquence and a look of persistent horror. … [Howard’s] instrumental panache, driven by beavering strings, constantly slashed by hard percussion, received its most powerful showcase in a section simulating the cavalry slaughter (15 killed, more than 600 injured), where the chorus’s words, perhaps by design, became swallowed up in the feverish notes. Elsewhere, Howard simplified textures, allowing hymn cadences into the mix, or spotlighting Christopher Purves’s thrusting baritone. When he sang the word “servitude” you could feel the shackles. It’s heartwarming to find a youngish British composer such as Howard with the confidence and muscle to carry off a blockbuster like this. …" 

Geoff Brown , The Times
1st July 2019

The Anvil received its world premiere last night. It’s an ambitious 45-minute cantata, seeking not only to tell the story but also to convey a "what-would-it-have-been-like-if-you-were-there" impression. Its construction is intricate, incorporating an idea of literally weaving words that evoke the event and its background (inspired by the fact that so many of those present or injured were described by the role of "weaver"). Michael Symmons Roberts constructed a giant grid of pregnant words that are assembled, dismantled and hurled into the mix, creating the effect of an unpredictable throng, with its slogans and would-be speakers, that must have been part of the reality of the day. As Emily Howard said afterwards: "If you were there you wouldn’t have heard anything most of the time – just snippets." So that element in the soundworld was intentional. At the same time there is a narrative element, as Symmons Roberts’s seven-paragraph The Stones of Peterloo, picturing the scene, the event and the aftermath, is overlaid on it and interspersed with it. This brings the more dramatic side of the story to the fore. Howard builds huge vocal-instrumental crashes, roars and surges, ratcheting up the tension as we know the fatal charge is coming, making her singers cry out their demands and the pulse of the music accelerate. There was almost an element of the Jaws film score about it – and with the greatest climax came a sound truly like that of a crowd in fear; and then there was the horrific peace that follows every bloodbath, with just the repeated intoning of the word "Suffrage", like an agonized prayer, still to be heard. Among the most vivid elements in this soundtrack to the story was the earlier, slow tread of a procession, with hymn-like strains emerging from the choirs, culminating in a full-throated rendering of Tallis’s Canon tune – only itself to be disrupted. This has its roots in the historical evidence, too: the agitators of the day wrote polemical new words to the tunes of hymns everyone knew. Kate Royal was assigned a role that included much of the narrative part of Symmons Roberts’s poem; Christopher Purves represented the various male protagonists of the event, and more … finally including a cold, Sprechstimme-style description of the injured and their wounds. The last word – unaccompanied soprano solo – is Symmons Roberts’s last vivid, but unsettling, summary of the heritage of Peterloo: "A piece of grit lodged in a tooth". (The title The Anvil, incidentally, simply refers to the approximate shape of the site’s ground-plan on the map).

The Arts Desk,
1st July 2019

Discography

The Anvil

The Anvil
  • Label
    Delphian
  • Catalogue Number
    DCD34285-CD
  • Conductor
    Ben Gernon / Vimbayi Kaziboni
  • Ensemble
    BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / BBC Singers / Hallé Choir / Hallé Youth Choir / Hallé Ancoats Community Choir
  • Soloist
    Kate Royal, Claire Booth, Hugh Cutting, Christopher Purves
  • Released
    29th September 2023

More Info