Iain Farrington

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  • Home
  • Biography
    • London 2012 Olympics
    • The Coronation 2023
  • Arrangements
    • Symphony Orchestra
    • Chamber Orchestra
    • Chamber Music
    • Choral
    • Vocal
    • Piano/Organ
    • Musical Theatre
    • Opera
    • Jazz/Pop/Folk Songs
    • Piano reductions
    • Elgar Complete Edition
    • List of orchestral performers
  • Compositions
    • Orchestra
    • Piano
    • Organ
    • Chamber
    • Vocal & Choral
    • Brass Band
  • Pianist
    • Mahler Piano Series
  • Organist
  • Art Deco Trio
  • Recordings
  • Diary
  • Contact
Picture
Lamenting Lullaby
​for Oboe, Violin, Viola and Cello


Lamenting Lullaby was composed in 2018, based on material written in 2007. It is a meditation on the death of a child at birth, and of quiet grief. The piece is in three sections: slow, sustained music for the strings of restrained tension and release; a distant solo oboe call; and folk-like lullaby music of gentle simplicity, with lamenting phrases from the oboe.

It was first performed on June 2018 at the Fitzrovia Chapel, London by Daniel Bates (oboe), Laura Lutzke (violin), Adam Newman (viola), Hannah Sloane (cello)  

Duration: 9 mins

Available to purchase from Aria Editions here

The piece has been recorded by the original performers here:​

Reviews of the recording:

BBC Music Magazine

Iain Farrington’s Lamenting Lullaby, premiered in 2018 by this ensemble, is a three part elegy of the ‘quiet grief’ after the death of a child at birth. It is moving, deeply tender, exquisitely played by this ensemble, its final warm, folk inflected ensemble flung in to relief by the echoed notes of the lone oboe. 

Gramophone

Iain Farrington’s Lamenting Lullaby of 2018, from which the recording takes its title, dwells on the grief and tragedy of infant death at childbirth. A haunting threnody or ‘meditation’ (to use the composer’s description), it was largely inspired by the exquisite Fitzrovia Chapel, a surviving gem of the now defunct Middlesex Hospital and its early pioneering maternal facilities, whose internal architecture influenced the spatial dimension of the work’s first performance with its distant ‘offstage’ oboe.