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| Sasha Johnson Manning with
Philip Barnes (Bowdon Church, England, 1998) |
Born in Manchester, England, Sasha Johnson Manning trained in voice and ’cello at the Royal Academy of Music, where she also studied composition with Roger Steptoe. After some years in London, Sasha returned to the north west of England, to work freelance as a performer and teacher. She is currently on the faculty of Withington School, and is a member of The Britten Singers (formerly the BBC Northern Singers) with whom she has made numerous broadcasts and recordings, both as a soloist and as an ensemble singer. She sings each week for BBC Radio Four’s Daily Service, which she sometimes directs. She has also made recordings for a wide variety of radio and television programmes in Britain, on the Continent, and in Israel.
Sasha is also the director of music at St. Mary’s Parish Church in Bowdon, England, a church with a long and illustrious music tradition. She has directed the church choir for several BBC programmes, and has conducted the choir in many of the great English cathedrals. Many of her earlier compositions were written for her own choir, for her students at Withington School, and also for some small vocal ensembles in which she herself sang. Gradually, however, her music gained a wider audience through several commissions, especially from the St. Louis Chamber Chorus. For this choir she wrote a series of pieces that ultimately comprised a large-scale, unaccompanied Requiem. This complete work received its world premiere in May 2006, and may be heard on a new CD of St. Louis commissions, recorded for Regent Records in November 2006, and released in the fall of 2007. The Requiem has also been selected to conclude the 52nd annual season of the Chamber Chorus in May 2008. In addition to this major work, Sasha has written other works for the St. Louis Chamber Chorus, including Four Songs from Love’s Labour’s Lost, Mary Magdalen (to a poem by James Elroy Flecker), and Song: in memoriam GRF, commissioned to celebrate the life and music of Gerald Finzi. Other performers with whom Sasha has become particularly associated are the recorder virtuoso John Turner and the baritone Mark Rowlinson, both of whom have recorded her music.
This exposure to American audiences has led to commissions from other groups, including Three Motets for the choir of Holy Communion Church in University City, Missouri, an anthem and a carol for St. Peter’s Church in Ladue, Missouri, and The White Island for Parkway North High School in Missouri. In the summer of 2000 Sasha also composed a setting in D of the Evening Canticles, premiered by her own church choir and the choir of St. Peter’s, at a joint evensong at Manchester Cathedral. Other settings of the canticles and the mass have been performed at various times in the cathedrals of Norwich, Wells, Winchester, Worcester, and at York Minster. Other non-liturgical pieces include a series of ‘jingles’ for BBC Radio Five, a large-scale work for chorus and orchestra and a birthday tribute for the composer John Joubert, both performed in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, and various compositions performed in the Royal Albert Hall, London, and in recital halls at various universities. Sasha has also written a series of primer pieces for beginner instrumentalists, and several musicals for children; a recent commission for Withington School was entitled 2001 Space Iliad. Her most significant work of late has been The Manchester Carols, a collaboration with the distinguished poet Carol Ann Duffy. Finally, as a singer herself, Sasha has particularly enjoyed writing solo songs, and has composed both sacred and secular pieces with a variety of accompaniments.
As a soprano soloist, Sasha’s extensive oratorio repertoire ranges from Monteverdi’s Vespers to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria. She has toured Germany with the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-fields singing Haydn’s Creation, and has similarly toured Holland and Belgium with the guitarist Paco Peña, singing his Missa Flamenca. Sasha has also performed with the Deller Consort in concerts in France and Germany, and was a soloist with them in a production of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, presented in Turin and Sicily, and more recently in Bèthune, broadcast by French television.
In England Sasha has sung with countertenor Michael Chance at the Stour Music Festival, and has recently sung in performances of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Haydn’s Creation and Saint-Saëns’s Requiem. She has performed and recorded works by Henry Purcell with the Orchestra of the Golden Age, and made guest appearances with the early music group Musical Offering in works by Handel, Purcell, Scarlatti and Telemann. In September 2001 Sasha made her movie début in My Kingdom, which starred Richard Harris and Lynn Redgrave.
For further information about Sasha Johnson Manning, please contact her at sasha@fish.co.uk.