Septura premiere Panufnik Seven Heavens at the Wigmore Hall

In a programme celebrating Septura’s 10th anniversary, we were delighted to premiere a new commission by leading UK composer Roxanna Panufnik at the Wigmore Hall in London.

Artistic Director Matthew Knight wrote in the programme:

Septura was born out of a passion for the sound of brass instruments. We wanted to harness their intense emotional power to produce transformative musical experiences for our audiences. But a decade ago we had a problem: our brand new formation was bereft of repertoire. So we set about constructing our “counterfactual history” – imagining that the great composers had written for brass. 

Ten years and nine recordings later our oeuvre is extensive – arrangements and original works spanning five centuries and many genres, shining a spotlight on underrepresented composers. Today we premiere the latest addition, Seven Heavens by Roxanna Panufnik. 

The first ten years of our project have been a voyage of discovery, mining the rich seam of the septet’s sound: we thank you for joining us on that journey, and look forward to what the next decade may bring.

The influence of Abrahamic religions is felt in much of Septura’s repertoire, and this spiritual element was Roxanna’s starting point: her piece is based on the Muslim concept of seven levels, or ‘Jannah’, of paradisiacal afterlife. She writes:

Each heaven has its own unique atmosphere, and is portrayed in a short movement, where one of the players is featured as a soloist. Throughout the piece I have used Arab maqams (or scales) to place the work’s sound world at the source of Islam.

Alongside the Panufnik, Septura performed some of the arrangements that have been most significant to the group’s development in the past decade, including the Lagrime di San Pietro by Lassus, and the Eighth Quartet by Shostakovich.