Hebrides Ensemble; Ailish Tynan soprano; Marcus Farnsworth baritone

Stuart MacRae’s Parable, commissioned by the Hebrides Ensemble to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, confronts the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac as retold by Wilfred Owen. Its handling of dramatic tension and harrowing conclusion sets the scene for a programme rooted in the imagery of the great Scottish storytelling tradition, complete with an early gem from Thea Musgrave’s student days in Paris in the 1950s and Judith Weir’s haunting song cycle, Nuits d’Afrique, composed in 2015 as a companion piece to Ravel’s Chansons madécasses.