John Rutter at 80: premiere at St Paul’s and worldwide performances
2025 is the 80th birthday year of John Rutter, celebrated with a concert at St Paul’s Cathedral in London on 5 November featuring the premiere of I’ll make me a world. Decca has released the first album dedicated to Rutter’s works for orchestra, including the piano concerto Reflections.
John Rutter’s music published by Oxford University Press is promoted here under license by Boosey & Hawkes.
The 80th birthday of John Rutter, one of the most popular and widely performed of living composers, was celebrated on 24 September and this autumn brings a series of performances and recordings. A focal point for celebrations is provided by a concert on 5 November in the inspiring space of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, with Rutter conducting the Bach Choir and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
The concert features the world premiere of Rutter’s I’ll make me a world, setting texts by American poet James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), a writer and civil rights activist of predominantly Caribbean heritage. The 18-minute work is scored for soprano and baritone soloists, choir and orchestra and as the composer states “was partly inspired by the 1920s American music that James Weldon Johnson would himself have known: blues, gospel, jazz, Broadway, and probably the new sounds of the young George Gershwin.” I’ll make me a world can also be heard on a new Collegium recording, due for release in October, featuring soloists Melanie Marshall, Roderick Williams, the Cambridge Singers and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (COLCD141).
Also included on the St Paul’s programme is The Gift of Life, a major work for choir and orchestra that the composer set out to write as a counterpoint to his earlier Requiem, providing a celebration of creation and life itself in all its majesty and manifold beauty. The six-movement piece, set to a blend of liturgical passages, poetry and original text, bursts with unabashed jubilation. Its central movement, the Hymn to the Creator of Light for double choir, is an intricate layering of voices and instruments that envelops the listener in an array of radiant colours. The 40-minute score, premiered in Dallas in 2015, can be heard on a Collegium recording with the Cambridge Singers and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of the composer (COLCD 138).
> Information on the St Paul’s concert
> Vocal score of I’ll make me a world
It is undoubtedly Rutter’s choral compositions that have seen his music reaching internationally beyond English-speaking territories: as noted in a recent interview in Gramophone his “works have been translated into no fewer than 17 languages – the more unexpected, perhaps, being Korean, Japanese, Lithuanian, Romanian and Icelandic”. However the 80th birthday year has helped draw attention to the full range of Rutter’s output, including a new recording devoted solely to his orchestral works, released by Decca in September (4871478). As the composer notes in the recording booklet, “I love choral music with all my heart, and it’s true that the majority of my output is choral, but I have always cherished the rarer opportunities that have come my way to venture outside of that realm and write for orchestra, or indeed to compose all kinds of other music.”
The title of the new Decca disc, Reflections, is also that of Rutter’s piano concerto, written in 1979 and performed in its premiere recording by Steven Osborne. Following a grand cinematic prelude, the concerto offers a glittering Ravelian toccata, an elusive dreamy interlude, and a burlesque finale referencing the slapstick headlong energy of 1920s silent film comedy. Steven Osborne will join the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on 9 April for the concert premiere of this revised version of the concerto at Cadogan Hall in London, with the composer conducting, alongside a new Rutter work for oboe and orchestra.
Another rediscovered large-scale Rutter orchestral score heard on the Decca disc is Cityscapes, premiered at the Royal Festival Hall over half a century ago in 1974. The three movements, totalling 24 minutes, take us through a variety of urban landscapes: the Big Apple, the lost city of Atlantis, and London town as memorialized in William Dunbar’s 16th-century poem as ‘Flower of cities all’. The Four Miniatures for Orchestra, dating from 2021, started life as a guitar piece before being arranged here for chamber orchestra. Bookends for the recording are provided by Rutter’s recent Celebration Overture – as he notes “every composer’s portfolio needs a slam-bang overture” – and the contrapuntally constructed Elegy for piano and strings.
> Buy the new Decca recording on Presto Music
> Study score of Reflections
> Piano score of Reflections
Alongside worldwide performances of Rutter’s smaller-scale choral works to celebrate the 80th birthday, including much-loved carols, there are major European performances of his larger-form scores. The Requiem for soprano, choir and orchestra is scheduled in both Sweden and Bulgaria over the coming months. The composer conducts the work at Stockholm Cathedral on 26 October with soprano Kathrin Lorenzen, the Stockholm Cathedral Choir and the chamber orchestra of the Royal Court Orchestra. The performance of Requiem at the Bulgaria Concert Hall in Sofia on 30 November features soprano Mariya Slavova, the National Philharmonic Choir and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nayden Todorov.
> John Rutter at OUP
> Visit John Rutter's website
Photo courtesy of John Rutter