We’re pleased to share that Michael Price’s album, “The Seasons”, on which we feature, is now available to purchase.
Back in November 2025, we stepped into the “studio” (aka a very cold church) with Michael Price, best known for his work on award-winning TV and film scores, including BBC’s Sherlock, to record for this exciting project.
“The Seasons” is a set of four chamber works, each taking inspiration from a First World War poem tied to a particular place, year, and season. Together they follow the war from its first summer in 1914 to the morning after the Armistice in Autumn 1918. Each season features a different ensemble, and our contribution was “Winter”.
Michael took the texts for the three pieces we sing from poems written by Edward Thomas, who was killed on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, at an observation post just south of Arras, on the first day of the battle there:- Snow, with its child’s cry in the white hush; Thaw, four lines in which the rooks see from the elm-tops what we below cannot – winter passing; and Lights Out, drafted at the barracks in Trowbridge in the November before he sailed.
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More about the Album
The Seasons (1914–18) is a set of four chamber works, each taking inspiration from a First World War poem tied to a particular place, year, and season. Together they follow the war from its first summer to the morning after the Armistice. The order of movements acts as a journal of the war – Summer 1914, Spring 1915, Winter 1917, Autumn 1918. As a whole, it looks back to a summer that seemed untroubled, forward into the conflict, and on to the strange quiet of an ending. Each season has its own ensemble, and I wanted the four sound-worlds to be as distinct as the four years. A brass quintet for the bright, public light of London in 1914. A wind quintet for the Hampshire woods. Six unaccompanied voices for the great silence of snow, and a string quartet for a Paris table on the night the guns stopped. The four works were recorded over the past year in churches (three in London, one in Suffolk) in rooms that have held music, mourning and celebration for generations. I hope you can hear the sound of the different spaces as you listen to each Season. This record is released for Remembrance Sunday. It’s about one war, but I don’t think of it as being only about that one. The war is a mirror for all conflicts, and the seasons go on turning through every one of them. What the poets noticed then is what I now see with my own family, walking in the woods and hills of the Chilterns. We’re more connected than we think.
Michael Price, Berkhamsted, September 2026