Press: News and Reviews

On Harry's death, John Gray of The Vancouver Sun wrote:

"The Second World War generation has been checking out at such a rate, I feel like I am running an obituary column. But what gaping holes they leave behind! Last week it was Harry Somers, arguably Canada's greatest composer in this century.

Such a gent: tall, handsome, with flowing white hair and an innocent curiosity of a six-year-old, Harry's preoccupations were music, tennis and the truth. His mother was a Theosophist who subscribed to the Daily Worker and the Financial Times - which deeply puzzled the RCMP during the McCarthy era. As a young man he got his start with a scholarship to study composition in Paris - a hockey scholarship. The team wanted to honour a great hockey player with artistic talent. (Isn't Canadian culture boring?)"

A Thousand Ages performance at the Winnipeg Music festival:

Monday, January 31, 2000
Robert Everett-Green, Music Critic, The Globe and Mail


Harry Somers's A Thousand Ages is the last work he completed before his death last year. It's a setting for men's voices, boy soprano, electronic tape and orchestra of five verses of the old hymn, O God Our Help In Ages Past,which was apparently a favourite of troops during the First World War. The score is really an annotation, a record of the composer's distance from the unimaginable experience of those troops. The hymn's simple assurance becomes a profound enigma, as the voices spiral away from the original tune with each successive verse, and the orchestra worries away at the meaning of it all. It's a powerful concept, and powerful also in performance, as for instance when the hall faded to black and the accelerating mechanical roar of Charles Gray's tape gradually overwhelmed the scene.

 

 

*N.B. this page is under construction - look for many more clippings and reviews to be posted early 2000.