The Church at Errislannan
for Solo Melody Instrument & Piano
This Grade 3 piece is also a short, lyrical and atmospheric encore piece for professional recitalists
Level:  Easy
Duration: 1'00"

Scores available:
E minor for Saxophone
Click on the ABRSM image, to purchase this score
​G minor for Bassoon; D minor for Oboe & Descant; A minor for Treble Recorder or Flute
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One of my favourite miniature pieces, The Church is the story of a long-ago concert near Clifden, Galway, Ireland, on the Errislannan peninsula. ​

​In the winter of 1996, harpsichordist Katharine May and I performed an evening recital in Holy Trinity Church, as part of Music for Galway's annual concert series.  It was the coldest - but most atmospheric - concert I have ever given, there on the edge of the Old World.  I wore my long black coat throughout the concert, and I also played flat throughout the entire concert, owing to the extreme cold!  Various composers were on the programme, including Handel, Stephen Dodgson and Francois Couperin. 

I will never forget arriving, in the afternoon, at the top of the road shown in the cover photograph on the score, and watching Katharine get out of the car to walk down to the lough, whilst I went on up to this lovely church, to check my reeds before we rehearsed.  
Based in London, England, international prizewinning musician Althea Talbot-Howard is a classical composer who began her professional career in 1992 as a soloist and orchestral guest principal. In 2005, Gramophone Magazine called her “a superb oboist”.  A graduate of Girton College, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music; she won Third Prize in the Paris-Ville d'Avray International Oboe Competition in 2007; and was one of twelve equal prizewinners in the Ora Singers Christmas Gift Composition Competition in 2019. 
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Of Afro-British ancestry, she is a 12th-generation direct descendant of King Charles II, who formalized Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade; and therefore a 14th-generation descendant of King James I & VI, who commissioned the Authorized Version of the Bible.  Both anti-slavery and Christian themes feature strongly in her compositional output.