Some of our finest actors have contributed spoken performances to a contemporary classical and electronic music album Incidental: Music for the Stage, proceeds of which will go to Northampton’s Royal and Derngate.
Judi Dench, Amanda Seyfried, David Harewood, Felicity Jones, Giles Terera, Patricia Routledge, James Norton, Sharon D Clarke, Iain Glen, Lesley Sharp, Stephen Fry, Indira Varma, Maxine Peake, Roger Allam, Anton Lesser and Simon Russell Beale are all featured on the album along with original music from stage productions by composers including White Lies, Anne Dudley, These New Puritans, Rachel Portman, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Renell Shaw.
Two singles have been released, Rachel Portman’s prologue to A Tale of Two Cities with Judi Dench and White Lies’ prologue to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof featuring Amanda Seyfried.
Over the past decade, Royal and Derngate’s artistic director James Dacre has commissioned 12 of today’s most influential composers to write original music for his productions. The album features their compositions for the stage accompanied by narration and monologues from the plays and novels which inspired them.
Dacre directs the album, which is creatively produced by Jim Barne and produced by Rupert Hollier (Filmtrax), James Vella (Phantom Limb) and Rosie Townshend (Royal and Derngate). Sound design is by David Gregory, Adrienne Quartly and Claire Windsor. The mastering engineer is Dietrich Schoenemann.
Incidental: Music for The Stage will be available to stream from Friday 24 September or can be pre-ordered from the Incidental Music for the Stage web site.