Philip Sawyers: Mayflower on the Sea of Time

Mayflower on the Sea of Time, a majestic and powerful work that narrates a historical constellation in a rigorously thought out musical connection.
It was commissioned by producer Anne Renshaw, as part of a project funded by Worcester City Council for school choirs in Worcestershire for 2020. Mayflower on The Sea of Time was supposed to have premiered at Worcester Cathedral on April 25, 2020, but that was not the case due to the first lockdown of the pandemic. This monumental album showcases the world premiere of this work, recorded live on June 17, 2023.
The London author who created the album cover, the painter Philip R. Groom, connects with the composer through the desire to create a dialogue between the inner world, represented in symbols, and external reality. This seemingly simple practice of dialogue requires thinking and reflection on the nature of people. This is an example of oratory, music or literature presented in therapeutic terms, because Sawyers tells us about human anxieties, the fragility of memory and the encounter between human beings with crossing interests and very different cultures...

Kenneth Woods, conductor of the English Symphony Orchestra (ESO), has approached oratorio with a masterful command of the score and with a great ability to embroider the various leitmotifs. Woods emphasizes timbre and orchestral texture with unwavering conviction, modulates with great sensitivity the imposing symbols that the composer gives to the lavish voices of the ESO choir, and seeks that primordial dialogue between the orchestra and the moving emotional space that rests on the text.
Thus, he directs the world premiere of Philip Sawyers' oratorio and, at the same time, grows the select catalog of Nimbus Records. - Sonogram, Carme Miro

In the last 20 years the music of Philip Sawyers (b.1951) has emerged from obscurity into the limelight making a considerable impression. I make this the fifth disc that has been recorded by the English Symphony Orchestra and Kenneth Woods who, by now, will really understand the composer’s needs and bring them to fruition as they do here. This oratorio which lasts almost an hour was due for performance in 2020 in Worcester, but Covid put paid to that. So, this recording is of the live performance which eventually took place in June this year at the Cathedral (2023). But why Worcester? First, it was commissioned by the wonderfully enlightened Worcester City Council in celebration of the 400^th Anniversary of the Sailing of the Mayflower to America and focussing on one of its early settlers, one Edward Winslow who was educated at the King’s School. The idea behind the project was educational, and involved about two hundred young people to sing this brand-new work under the guidance of director Neil Ferris. The libretto by Philip Groom focuses on Winslow but also uses entries from a diary written at the time by William Bradford which gives ‘names and glimpses of characters’, Groom tells us. But poetry by Walt Whitman is included in the final section, and Sawyers also quotes part of a motet by Thomas Tomkins who was organist of Worcester in the 1620’s. The work falls into four sections. First, Persecution and Journey which the composer admits gave him ‘scope for an exciting storm at sea section’. Part 2 is Arrival at the New World which includes a section focusing on the pilgrim children. A brief Scherzo ensues, showing that Sawyers, with five symphonies behind him, always thinks symphonically and dramatically, this is entitled Survival and Making Our Community. Finally, the longest section, Our New World, is a ‘joyous celebration, the first Thanksgiving’ the composer says. It is a good idea to follow the libretto as, although the singers do their best, some of the text gets lost in orchestral texture and acoustic. But to do this you must scan the bar code supplied in the excellent thirty-page booklet with its essays and photographs.

All praise then goes to the four very impressive soloists and the orchestra and chorus and not least to Woods, whose commitment to Sawyers has enabled this music to reach a much wider audience, which it thoroughly deserves. It is largely diatonic, full of passion and always approachable.

Review by Gary Higginson, British Music Society