| "In Flanders Fields" is CB&S's performance drawing on their collected work for Peace Concerts Passendale. It's a words and music piece, including poems and readings, instrumental music and accompanied as well as acappella songs. As you might expect from us, it's got elements of humour as well as comment on the unforgiveable waste of life. | |
Commissioned by Peace Concerts Passendale in Flanders for the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele.
“A painful beauty” Het Nieuwsblad
“Music seldom performs so savage an indictment against destruction.” New Internationalist
“... it succeeds triumphantly. Brilliant - no question.” Folk Roots
"Their singing seems to go from strength to strength, their writing is full of power and force and their harmonies are - quite sublime". Rock n Reel.
Since their first appearance in 1993, Barry Coope, Jim Boyes and Lester Simpsons powerful and distinctive unaccompanied singing have taken English tradition into radical new directions. Described by music critics as 'quite simply the best purveyors of acappella song on these Islands', their concerts, records and songwriting have delighted audiences and won acclaim from roots, rock and art music critics alike. Their first record was the rock magazine Q's Roots Album of the Year, while their live debut on BBC Radio Four drew praise from the classical composer Steve Martland.
Andy Kershaw commissioned them to write and record for his BBC Radio One series, Kershaw Comes Home and they were invited to perform their Passchendaele Suite at the eightieth anniversary commemorations of the battle in Passendale itself. Whether bringing incomparable, vibrant harmonies to their own writing on Falling Slowly or the traditional songs reinterpreted on Hindsight and A Garland of Carols, Coope Boyes and Simpson have, a Folk Roots reviewer concluded, 'a good claim to have rejuvenated unaccompanied English harmony.'
As singers, Coope Boyes & Simpson have appeared on main stages of Festivals from Cambridge to Bruges, Dranouter and Sidmouth to Skagen in Denmark and Stimmen, Voices, Voix at Loerrach in Germany. Tours have taken them throughout Britain and into the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal. Their live performances and records have been broadcast widely in Britain, North America and on the Continent and featured in programmes as diverse as BBC televisions Panorama, the Channel 4 film The Underground War, as well as providing session material for Andy Kershaw.
As writers, they have been commissioned to compose and arrange for performances including A Chorus from the Gallows in Nottingham, In Search of England and The Turn of the Tale for Sidmouth International Festival of Folk Art and Harvest Home for BBC Radio. They have also been involved in writing and performing a number of memorable productions about the Great War for Peace Concerts Passendale in Flanders, including Were Here Because Were Here, Passchendaele Terminus, Passchendaele Suite and Kerstbestand - a production about the Christmas Truce which received its first performance in Ieper (Ypres) Cathedral in December 1998. Currently they are working on a song cycle reflecting the past, present and future of the people of the Derbyshire town of Belper.
Coope, Boyes and Simpson have given concerts in York Minster and in a First War German dugout, to an audience of twenty thousand at the Dranouter Festival in Belgium and at the opening of the new David Hockney Gallery in Salts Mill - they even contribute a musical test piece for the Cambridge University Advanced Course in English for Foreign Students. "Coope, Boyes and Simpson prove that the British choral tradition needs no resuscitation," wrote an American critic, "their voices weave through and bounce off each other with a powerful elegance - it's nice to know that, even with the numbing array of technology available, the human voice is still one of the most expressive instruments around."
