Channel Firing

Pickard: Channel Firing was inspired by a poem by Thomas Hardy, written shortly before the outbreak of the Great War. The poem is set at night in a churchyard on the south coast of England. At the tremendous noise from gunnery practice at sea, the dead rise up, thinking it is the last judgement. God tells them it is a false alarm, and the dead return to their graves, lamenting the folly of the human race. In response to the poem Pickard has composed a dark and intense elegy, largely haunted by a quotation of two chords from the doom-laden prelude to Act 2 of Wagner's Götterdämmerung.
Gramophone: outstanding; BBC Music Magazine: outstanding.