Royal artists' tribute to old soldier
Published Date:
06 October 2008
THE Queen's personal poet and her composer are to collaborate for the first time – in Portsmouth.
Andrew Motion, poet laureate, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, are preparing an oratorio about 110-year-old Harry Patch, Britain's oldest survivor of the First World War.
A veteran of the battle of Passchendaele in which about 500,000 soldiers on both sides died, Mr Patch is the last surviving Briton to have fought on the western front.
The work, to be set to music, is a poem Motion wrote about Patch, from Wells, Somerset, for a television tribute.
It will receive its premiere on Remembrance Sunday, November 9, at Portsmouth Cathedral with the London Mozart Players and the choir of Portsmouth Grammar School, which commissioned it. Mr Patch has been invited.
The Portsmouth school commissioned the work in part because of the city's long naval associations.
The full article contains 154 words and appears in NS-Fareham & Gosport newspaper.
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Last Updated:
06 October 2008 10:42 AM
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Source:
NS-Fareham & Gosport
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Location:
Portsmouth
