PRESS RELEASE

Prima Facie to release 1st album in the Philharmonia’s trilogy celebrating the choral works of Andrew Downes (1950-2023)

A St Luke Passion & Sacred Choral Works

Released 27th March 2026 - PFCD281

Morgan Pearse (baritone)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Philharmonia Voices,

David Trippett

Audio link HERE

Sleevenotes link HERE

Score HERE

including a capella works:
The Lord is my Shepherd, The Souls of the Righteous,
In Peace I Will Lie Down,
O Love The Lord All Ye His Saints, O Magnum Mysterium, Ave Maria, Te Deum,
Ave Maris Stella, O Vos Omnes,
What Shall I Do to Show How Much I Love Her?

“gorgeous writing”

BBC Radio 3

On 27th March 2026, Prima Facie releases the premiere recording of Andrew Downes’ A St Luke Passion with The Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices conducted by David Trippett. Commissioned by the Wolverhampton Civic Choir in 1993 to be performed alongside Britten’s 1948 Cantata St Nicolas, Downes’ A St Luke Passion is the centre piece of the album which includes several a capella works. This is the first album in a trilogy of recordings of the large-scale choral works of Midlands composer Andrew Downes (1950-2023), who spent his entire life in Birmingham and the rural Midlands.

Photos by Christopher Jonas

Downes’ lyrical gift places him squarely in the Late Romantic English tradition as a successor to Howells, his teacher. Firmly rooted in the Midlands, Downes follows in the footsteps of other local composers who came before him - Elgar, Granville Bantock, Julius Harrison, Francis Edward Bache, Christopher Edmunds and John Joubert.

From a musical family, his father was a horn player in the CBSO and his uncle a founding member of The Philharmonia. A talented boy treble, Downes became a countertenor choral scholar at St John’s, Cambridge, later performing Handel opera roles alongside Fisher-Dieskau.

Combining contrapuntal ingenuity and textural athleticism, Downes’ choral works paid homage to Tudor church music. However, his music was not solely rooted in the western tradition, for he sought out inspiration from African drumming, modal scales from North Indian classical music, jazz and rock music, reflecting the depth of responsibility he felt as an educator to instruct and enthuse in a broad range of traditions. For example, his Violin Sonatas are based on Indian rāgas and incorporate striking rhythmic displacements and syncopations to brilliant effect.

Downes loved the “smooth, timeless quality” of plainsong, and in particular the contrapuntal works of Palestrina and Monteverdi, whose freer approach to instrumentation provided inspiration for his St Luke Passion, which was scored for choir, tenor soloist, keyboard, percussion and strings. When the crowd arrests and drags Jesus away, the cello line bursts forth accompanied by a menacing snare drum. In the tussle between Pontius Pilate and the crowd, Downes has the chorus and orchestra play in different time signatures simultaneously. “This multi-dimensional effect is straight out of African tribal music where each player has a regular pattern, but in a different time from everyone else”, Downes explains. When Jesus is nailed to the cross, Downes called on the clang of an anvil to bring to life the most psychologically disturbing parts of the text.

Swinging from Bernstein-like exuberance to African-inspired rhythmic passages, Downes finds an unexpected unity with ancient ecclesiastical music to create a message of communion across musical styles, eras and places in his St Luke Passion.

Downes not only continued the choral tradition of his English forefathers but in his educational work he passed on the flame and paved the way for future generations to follow him. At the Birmingham School of Music (now the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire), where he was Head of Composition and Creative Studies for 30 years, he devised and designed imaginative and groundbreaking courses, pioneered the study and practice of ethnomusicology, building a composition department of international importance and directed themed festivals and concerts.

As conductor David Trippett explains:
“Downes is a unique voice that blends deeply choral instincts with a creative eclecticism that sparks and surprises in its imaginative reach.

A proud Black Country native, he carried the identity of his home region into his compositions, from local landscapes in the Clent and Malvern Hills to regional poets whose words he set.

He is both an original and steeped in tradition, supported by firm foundations in the rural Midlands, Elgar’s “living centre of music” at England’s heart.”

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Photo credit Paul Cartwright

Andrew Downes was born in Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1950, into a well-known Midlands family of musicians. He won a choral scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he specialised in composition, and in 1974 went on to study at the Royal College of Music with Herbert Howells, who described him as ‘one of the most effective composers coming to me these days. I have very considerable hopes for him’. His emergence as a leading international composer was combined with a strong academic profile as an innovative and inspired educator: he created and was Head of the School of Composition and Creative Studies at the Birmingham School of Music (now Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) for 30 years, and following his retirement, devoted himself solely to composition. His output included an opera, six symphonies, numerous concerti and chamber works, song cycles, piano music and a large body of choral and sacred music.

Downes’s music has been performed in many leading concert halls, cathedrals and festivals worldwide, and has been broadcast on BBC Radios 2, 3 and 4, BBC TV, Czech Radio, France Musique, Italian TV, Austrian Radio, Dutch Radio and Central Peking Radio.

Over 30 CDs of his music have been issued on a range of labels. His numerous commissions included The Marshes of Glynn, for the Royal Opening of Birmingham’s Adrian Boult Hall in 1986; the overture In the Cotswolds for the opening concert of the Three Choirs Festival; song cycles for Sarah Walker and John Mitchinson, both premièred on BBC Radio 3; anthems (Opus 31, Nos 1, 2 and 3) for the BBC Radio 4 Daily Service; and the overture Towards a New Age, premièred by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham. Downes’s Concerto for Four Horns and Orchestra was commissioned for and premièred by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in the Dvorak Hall, Prague, in 2002, and recorded by Czech Radio the following year. His Sonata for Violin, Horn and Piano was premièred by the Brahms Trio Prague at the Suk Hall of the Rudolfinum, Prague, in 2008, and subsequently released on the Czech Philharmonic’s Artesmon label. Downes’s Piano and Horn Concertos were premiered at Birmingham Town Hall in 2009 and 2012 respectively. In 2016, the Artesmon label released a disk of Downes' Symphonies and Overtures, recorded by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in the Rudolfinum, Prague under Ondřej Vrabec.

He died on 2nd January 2023, leaving a legacy of over 120 works. A prolific composer, he wrote every day until the last week of his life.

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David Trippett is Chair of the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.

As a pianist and conductor, he has performed within Europe, the UK, in China, and on both coasts of America in venues from the Liszt Academy in Budapest and the Britten-Pears Festival, Aldeburgh to the Shanghai Conservatory and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. His realistion of Liszt’s Italian opera Sardanapalo between 2017-19 resulted in the work’s first critical and performing editions. Its premiere recording with Kirill Karabits and the Staatskapelle Weimar was among the Guardian’s Top 10 Discs of 2019, receiving Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice and Diapason’s découverte. It became the best-selling classical CD in the UK, and has now been performed in seven countries.

As a scholar, his research focuses on nineteenth-century music and intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the history of science. He is author of Wagner’s Melodies (2013), editor and translator of Carl Stumpf, The Origins of Music (2012), and more recently he co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture (2019), Opera and the Scientific Imagination (2019), and Wagner in Context (2024). Awards for research include the Alfred Einstein and Lewis Lockwood Prizes of the American Musicological Society, the Bruno Nettl Prize of Society for Ethnomusicology, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Between 2015-2020, he directed a project on ‘Sound and Materialism in the Nineteenth Century’. Arising from this, his latest book, Sound in Mind and Body, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Press Releases for the other two Philharmonia Releases:
The Marshes of Glynn & Song of the Prairies
New Dawn

Further information on the Philharmonia Trilogy