Postcards from winter

First performed at the Chapel of Royal Holloway, Egham (England, UK) on 19 December 2026, with Cecily Beer (harp) and Hugh Beckwith (conductor).

Postcards from Winter brings together three poets connected to the landscape around Egham and wider Surrey, each offering a different perspective on winter.

The first movement draws on Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, written while he lived in Egham. His description of the landscape develops into a meditation on the opposing forces through which the natural world exists: dryness and moisture, coldness and heat. Snow, rain, rivers, and clouds become part of a larger cycle of transformation, in which apparent opposites sustain one another and stillness gives way to movement.

The second movement sets Langspiel by Penelope Shuttle, born in Staines. Her poem explores winter as an experience of hardship, solitude, and endurance. Yet alongside sorrow and coldness are moments of unexpected beauty: a golden cliff, a sunlit tide line, and the recurring voice of the harp. The poem suggests that joy and difficulty can coexist, and that life involves a continual exchange between what is old and what is new.

The final movement sets George Meredith’s Winter Heavens, written during his years living on Box Hill. It begins with a frost-sharp night and a sky alive with stars. The winter landscape becomes a meditation on mortality, memory, and the relationship between life and death, ultimately arriving at a sense of radiance and spiritual haven.

-njd.

SATB choir (divisi), harp

10’