SOME of the country’s leading composers have been behind Skipton Building Society Camerata orchestra’s project to set lockdown stories to music.

When the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of all live performances, the Camerata, based at Skipton Town Hall, hatched a plan, to keep its creativity flowing and offering much needed employment to freelance musicians and composers.

Ben Crick, its founder, knew the only viable option was to take the orchestra’s usual live performance online, as they launched an appeal to gather different experiences of lockdown.

The five shortlisted stories were scripted by Bradford writer Kamal Kaan and given to some of the UK’s leading composers, many internationally renowned, to write the music to match the mood of the words.

The musicians, including top violinist and orchestra leader Sophie Rosa, were filmed as actors performed the Orchestra Lockdown Diaries, without an audience, at Kala Sangam Arts Centre in Bradford.

After working around Covid-19 restrictions, a series of Coronavirus themed short films have been released online.

Mr Crick, artistic director of Skipton Camerata, said: “When lockdown first hit in March the musicians had their livelihoods taken away in an instant. Everything disappeared.

“We’d had a busy year of bookings planned for 2020 but overnight they vanished.

“Things seemed to be picking up again with socially distanced events looking possible, but now it’s not possible to arrange performances in public for the foreseeable future.

“The virus has been the most challenging and life changing event many of us will experience.”

He said it was vital that musicians and performers should mark the ‘elephant in the room’ and portray the human element.

Mr Crick said: “Historically and traditionally musicians are storytellers, reflecting the state and mood of society, even Beethoven was at it.

“Orchestras should be dealing with difficult subjects, which are happening right now, telling those stories and reaching as wide an audience as possible and that is what we hope to do.”

The filmed performances feature coronavirus related themes such as being a frontline worker, an anti-masker, a survivor, an outsider and death.

Actors Claire-Marie Seddon and Rob Edwards narrate the words, which were gathered following a public appeal for personal experiences of lockdown.

Mr Crick explained that most of the orchestra’s 45 musicians had struggled to continue working: “Most have had no work at all and many have fallen between the cracks of being able to claim any Government support.

“We have members from around the UK and Europe. There are some amazingly talented musicians and composers out there. I believe in collaboration, it brings the best out in people.”

The composers include Jake Adams, a teacher from Brighouse, who wrote a piece of music called The Survivor.

He said: “It is about a man who contracted Covid-19 in March and was put into a coma before eventually recovering.

“My main focus when composing this piece was to allow the text to be expressed clearly and to not be hindered by the music, as it is important to remember during this pandemic that it is not just statistics and economies being hurt, but also real people with real stories.

“As such the material and gestures of the ensemble are relatively simple, focusing more on slow moving lines and shifting harmonies than moments of drama.”

Composer John Kerala Kerr, of Newcastle, wrote music for the story of The Outsider.

He said: “My response to Kamal Kaan’s script was to draw out the story’s feline narrator with its disapproving and supercilious nature ‘cats have nine lives, you only one’ and glib attitude towards its owner’s death.

“The Greek folk dance known as the Zeibekiko, with its nine-beat phrasing, provides the musical ‘other’ here, as does a touch of dubstep and a nod in the direction of a certain West End musical.

“Together, these elements bring intensity to the quirky depiction of the Covid lockdown, as viewed from the perspective of a domestic pet.”

Other composers are Dr Susannah Self, Nicholas Olsen and Rania Chrysostomou.

Mr Crick added: “Musicians, like everyone, have been looking for work elsewhere. I know of one musician who is very talented but was turned down for a supermarket delivery job.

“In future, finding creative ways of producing music content digitally will have to play a larger role in performing arts activities.”

Skipton Camerata is a charity and strives to remove the barriers that prevent people from engaging with the classical repertoire, whether it is because of cost or distance.

The orchestra is sponsored by the Skipton Building Society and funded by the Garfield Weston Foundation as well as a donation from Sheffield Oratorio Chorus specifically for this project.

Visit: https://youtu.be/Ihr_6FdiCAw. The films can be seen at www.skiptoncamerata.com