Latest news:
Nathan’s Hornpipe for violin and piano enjoys regular performances with the violinist Caroline Speca and artist James Mayhew as part of the magical Once Upon a Tune project. The work partners with Debussy’s Le Cathédrale Engloutie, being based on the legend of sunken cathedrals at Dunwich, near Nathan’s home on the Suffolk Coast. More details here…
The Quest nominated!
Nathan’s latest major work, The Quest was nominated for the 2025 Ivor Composition Awards. Commissioned by London Youth Opera, to a libretto by Megg Nicol, The Quest was premiered in December 2024 at the Shaw Theatre, London, with a cast of 50 performers aged 9 to 18 supported by a professional creative team, led by music director Alastair Chilvers and director Madeleine Allegra Brooks.
Inspired by Auden and Isherwood, The Quest depicts a group of young people who, against a backdrop of social media, fake news and malign political influences, have to make a choice between power, fame and personal fortune and integrity, true friendship, and the greater good.
Click here to visit London Youth Opera’s website and learn more about the piece and the wonderful production!
Grey and Green are all my Light, a song-cycle for baritone and piano, sets poetry and prose by Suffolk writer Robert Jellicoe, taken from his 2021 book ‘Shorelines’: Voices of Southwold Fishermen. The book is a history of fishing and other maritime industry in and around the Suffolk coastal town of Southwold (home to both the writer and the composer) – but that rather dry description scarcely does justice to what is a deeply moving, personal and multi-layered work of non-fiction. Running throughout Shorelines are poetic prefaces to various chapters, in which the author relates dreamlike encounters with ghosts of fishermen and other sea-farers lost at sea and their efforts to communicate with their loved ones left behind. It is from these prefaces that the texts set here are drawn.
The songs are also inspired by seventeen folk songs and dances collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth on a visit to Southwold in 1910.
Click here for further information.
Quartet Black, a Britten-Pears Arts Commission, premiered at the Aldeburgh festival in June 2023 by the Heath Quartet. Nathan describes the work as ‘a deeply personal work, juxtaposing consonance and dissonance, darkness and light, tenderness and rage, in a heady cocktail of extremes’.
Nathan wrote a blog on the work in the lead-up to the premiere, which can be found on this site – the first part is here and subsequent posts can be found via the news section of the homepage.
Other news:
- A recording of The Little That Was Once a Man, a song-cycle for voice and piano setting texts by Bryan Heiser, is available on SOMM Recordings’ Volume III of ‘100 Years of British Song’, performed by James Gilchrist and the composer.
- Nathan’s reflective and whimsical Intermezzo for solo piano is also included on this volume as a ‘bonus track’ – click here to hear this work performed live from recording sessions.
A full catalogue of Nathan’s compositions can be browsed here or via the ‘Works’ button in the menu above.
CD recordings of Nathan’s work can be found on the Albums page.
