Bamburgh church hosts WWI memorial installation

St Aidan’s Church in Bamburgh in the north of England will be the scene for a memory-focused installation of art and music starting this weekend. From Saturday (4 November) to 18 November a sculpted artwork of bells by Keith Roberts entitled Caporetto (pictured below) will be on display at the church alongside a recording of Memorial by Northumberland-based composer John Casken.

Casken’s choral work, written for Coquetdale Chamber Choir in 2014, tells the story of 12 men from Upper Coquetdale – the area around the River Coquet in Northumberland – who were lost during the First World War and whose bodies were never found. Their names, ages and the villages where they lived form part of Casken’s text for Memorial.

Written for soprano and baritone soloists, choir and percussion, the piece has been recorded by University of Manchester’s chamber choir the Cosmo Singers, conducted by Wrexham-born Robert Guy with soloists Katie Emmanuel and Alex Hopkins. The recording will be played as part of the installation at St Aidan’s Church at 11am and 3.30pm Monday to Saturday, and on Sundays at 3.30pm for the duration of the installation.

Roberts’ Caporetto sculpture will be on display during this period. Continuing the artist’s use of bells as symbols, Caporetto presents the destruction of war through a set of nine broken and fractured bells. The work, created in 2017, memorialises a battle fought on the Italian front during the autumn of 1917 and asks the viewer ‘to consider what it is to be silenced’.