The BBC Singers have commissioned a new work from WWM composer Bernard Hughes. The Singers have already performed Two Swans (now published, in an expanded form, as Three Swans), One-and-a-Half Truths, and The Death of Balder, which they performed at the City of London Festival in 2009.
As in The Death of Balder, which is based on Norse myth as told by the twelfth-century poet Snorri Sturluson, Bernard Hughes is again drawing on ancient literature for this new work, which will set medieval texts drawn from a thirteenth-century Latin bestiary in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and three allegorical poems from the Exeter Book, a tenth-century collection of poetry bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral Library by Leofric, who became its first bishop in 1050.