Anna
Lapwood

Last year saw the retirement of Pembroke College’s long-term Master, Lord Chris Smith. I asked if he had any requests for his final concert, and he requested Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. I spent a couple of days looking at different arrangements of this online; most of the choral arrangements seemed to lean towards the pop side of things, so 48 hours before the concert I decided to try writing my own arrangement. I wanted it to be slightly more classically oriented whilst also capturing the spirit of the original – you might hear the echoes of Biebl’s Ave Maria in there at one point!

Hallelujah is a piece that I’ve sung so many times – often around the piano with friends at a party – and the thing I always find most moving about it is towards the end of the piece when the chorus is just repeated over and over again, almost like a prayer, growing in intensity as nobody wants the music to stop. I’ve tried to capture some of this magic in the final section, where the surprise addition of the organ helps the music build and then fall back to nothing.

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