PRESS RELEASE

Prima Facie to release 2nd album in the Philharmonia’s trilogy celebrating the choral works of Andrew Downes (1950-2023)

The Marshes of Glynn & Song of the Prairies

Released 24th July 2026 - PFCD282

Brenden Gunnell (tenor)

Paula Downes (soprano), Eleanor Minney (mezzo-soprano)

Sam Madden (tenor), Simon Grant (bass)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Philharmonia Voices,

David Trippett

Audio link HERE

Sleevenotes link HERE

The Marshes of Glynn Score HERE

Song of the Prairies Score HERE

THE MARSHES OF GLYNN, Op. 33 (1985) 

Cantata for tenor solo, SATB choir and symphony orchestra 

1. Very slow, very still and calm
2. Allegro
3. Very slow once more

SONG OF THE PRAIRIES, Op. 44 (1988)

Cantata for SATB soloists, semi-choir of high voices, full chorus, symphony orchestra

4. Allegro ma non troppo
5. Andante
6. Moderato
7. Moderato, gently

“gorgeous writing”
BBC Radio 3

“well crafted, technically impressive and thoroughly professional: these are certainly the qualities that strike one listening to Downes’s St Luke Passion.”

★★★★★ Choir & Organ – A St Luke Passion

On 24th July 2026, Prima Facie releases the premiere recording of Andrew Downes’ The Marshes of Glynn with Grammy-nominated American tenor Brenden Gunnell and Song of the Prairies with The Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices conducted by David Trippett.

This release features two secular cantatas for choir and orchestra, setting 19th-century American poets (Sidney Lanier, William Cullen Bryant), in praise of the beauty of nature, its unfathomable spaces, the prairies that bear witness to the rise and fall of civilisations, and the vastness of landscapes that encapsulate the story of America.

Downes was preparing a cantata to mark the 1986 opening of the Adrian Boult Concert Hall at the Birmingham School of Music, and Lanier’s substantial poem served as a rich source of inspiration for The Marshes of Glynn, his first major composition for voices and orchestra. The three movements of the cantata depict the over-lapping environments of the Marshes of Glynn, a coastal area in Georgia, USA. 

Photos by Christopher Jonas

The work begins in a thick forest of entangled Southern oak trees. Downes evokes the quiet isolation of the shade with a pastoral theme. The eerie ding of a glockenspiel suggests beams of light that poke through the cover of the oaks at sunset, and the movement ends with a bright, orchestral climax as the speaker pushes boughs of the trees out of the way to exit to a nearby beach. The flute at the start of the second movement depicts that serpentine stretch of grey sand, the thin tissue that connects the sea and the marsh to the land. In the third movement, which lands the listener in the midst of the marsh itself, the humble croak of the marsh-hen can be heard in solos for English horn, while undulating string and choral interludes show the tide gradually flowing into the grassland until “the sea and the marsh are one.”

An excerpt from the end of Sidney Lanier’s poem The Marshes of Glynn:

“The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run 
Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; 
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr; 
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run; 
And the sea and the marsh are one. 
How still the plains of the waters be! 
The tide is in his ecstasy….”

Downes’s 1988 cantata Song of the Prairies, which he wrote for an annual singing weekend at Shrewsbury Public School led by John Rutter, is a rare piece that sounds beholden, if not loyal, to minimalism. Musicologist Nicky Swett explains, “In it, [Downes] does not abandon the harmonically rich choral style he was known for. Rather, he develops an elegant conversation between two kinds of music that on their surfaces are inverses of one another: minimalist pieces tend to be rhythmically active but feature a leisurely harmonic rhythm, while 20th-century English choral works are often rhythmically nebulous but constantly leverage expressive, harmonic twists and turns. The result of this combination is striking and quite unique—as though the Philip Glass Ensemble has stumbled into a Cambridge Evensong and everyone at the service is open to making it work.”

An excerpt from the beginning of William Cullen Bryant’s The Prairies:

“These are the gardens of the Desert, these 
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, 
For which the speech of England has no name— 
The Prairies. I behold them for the first, 
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight 
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch, 
In airy undulations, far away, 
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, 
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, 
And motionless forever…”

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 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:

“The magnificence and beauty of nature was Downes’ guiding star, his eternal muse. With an uncanny instinct for conjuring sound pictures, his secular cantatas convey the poets’ awe at the vastness of the landscape encircling them. We hear the whistle of sea breezes, the creek of ancient woodland, marsh-hens croaking, bison stomping, rivulets bubbling, all set against the unfolding horizon of the American planes. This music has a fundamentally positive message for our age of climate-consciousness.”

“There’s a Sibelian Quality to Downes’ work – wide open spaces that entrance and unnerve.”
BBC Music Magazine

---

Andrew Downes: 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.

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:
A St Luke Passion
New Dawn

Further information on the Philharmonia Trilogy