When the BBC commissioned this work for the Last Night of the Proms 2018, I was given quite a detailed brief. First, the work should be for the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the two choirs should be quite independent of each other. Secondly, the words should acknowledge the centenary of the end of World War I, but look optimistically to the future. For the centenary I chose In the Underworld by World War I poet Isaac Rosenberg, written in 1914. Originally about unrequited love, it can read, if you do not know its context, as a prophetic look at the next four years, with the sense that the women left