Invocation

Invocation was written for the Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford and represents the culmination of the composer’s time as a research fellow at the college, when he worked closely with the choir.

Philliphad long been a devotee of Edward Thomas’s evocative poem, Adlestrop, with its dreamy pastoral feel invoking the very essence of a sultry English country afternoon. It seemed a natural choice to set, not least because itmentions the two counties in which he has spent the last seven years, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.

Phillip wanted the workfurther to emphasise the link with everything we might class as a stereotypical Englishcountryafternoon cricket on the green, church bells, birdsong and warm beer the mythical ‘middle-England’. His work in no way tries to depict this, rather to distil the feeling it is a rhapsody on a theme of English countrylife, that men went to war to preserve, something very different from the more rugged landscape he grew up with in the Lake District.

The work is called Invocation, because it is precisely that, a spell orcharm, something that bewitches the listener and that the composer hopes stays long in the mind, rather like Adlestrop or indeed Adlestrop itself.