Emily Howard’s choral work The Anvil was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival in 2019 to commemorate the bicentenary of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester on August 16, 1819. Besides the prevailing elements of protest and violence, the message of the work is one of incipient demand for the vote, for regular parliaments, secret ballots and equal representation under the law. The libretto for the work was taken from two poems, ‘The Stones of Peterloo’ and ‘The Anvil Grid’ by Michael Symmons Roberts, and on this matrix of experimental language Howard based her work. Scored for a very large orchestra with additional woodwind, brass and percussion, it was also conceived for a range of different vocal ensembles requiring diverse musical treatments.

The continuity of the first part is provided by the soprano soloist, whose narrative role contrasts with the solo baritone, who plays a more dramatic role in the action as a voice of the weavers, so many of whom suffered that day. As an exercise in atmosphere and soundscape, The Anvil succeeds in depicting the horror and devastation of Peterloo. The use of musical gestures, including vivid dynamic juxtapositions, Ivesean superimpositions, popular melody and hymn tunes such as Tallis’s Canon, is undoubtedly effective but there are times when more contrast and variety of colours and timbres might have played a part in this dark depiction. The climax of the work, ‘The field turns inside out’, where there are almost four and a half minutes of unremitting dissonance and density of sound to illustrate the chaos, seems disappointingly predictable and I wondered if some other, less obvious means might have been deployed.

The more recent Elliptics (2022), a second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, I found more convincing as an organic whole. Inspired by the relationship between music and numbers, especially the mystical symbolism of the number 11 (which determines the 11 verses of the poem), the work is elegiac in its exploration of love and death with a particular focus on the lasting effect of love after death. Written for soprano and countertenor – Claire Booth and Hugh Cutting giving fine performances – the work has an elliptical ambience as the opening text returns at the conclusion and the asymmetrical proportions of Symmons Roberts’s verses are imaginatively presented by the singers who, besides their roles as individual soloists in quite different emotional worlds, share the text in a variety of manners, often governed by fixed intervals. It is this creative complex of contrast, capriciousness and atmospheric orchestral accompaniment that contributes to the work’s coherence and to its broader mood of melancholic introspection.