NEWS - Paraorchestra Death Songbook (with Brett Anderson & Charles Hazlewood) feat. Gwenno & Nadine Shah)

“Death is Not the End” Bob Dylan posited in 1988, and in music the Great Beyond remains a lustrous realm. In tackling the cutting short of life, love, hope or a hundred other brands of demise, songcraft has so often found its most anguished, impassioned and heartfelt voice. Death’s songbook, indeed, is a rich maelstrom of emotion, life at its most vivid.

“So much of the greatest art, certainly from my point of view, is intrinsically melancholic,” says Charles Hazlewood, founder and Artistic Director of the pioneering Paraorchestra, an award-winning conductor who has led some of the world’s most celebrated orchestras, and Sky Arts Ambassador for Music.

Paraorchestra recorded the majority of Death Songbook in an afternoon at the peak of lockdown in January 2021, socially distanced across Europe’s largest opera stage – the Donald Gordon Theatre at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff.