World Premiere of "Silence of the Day" - by Grant McLachlan (1974F).

Thanks to Rosemary Wilke of the CPO who sent us the article about one of our ODs Grant McLachlan which it features. 

From the stirring film music of Grant McLachlan to the contemplative and profound song cycle The Silence of the Day being premiered by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra on 18 September 2025 with William Berger as soloist and Martin Panteleev conducting at the City Hall, is less of a step than you may imagine.

Grant holds a master’s degree in composition and another in film music, according to PETA STEWART who writes:

For this Cape Town composer is classically trained, at Magdalen College, Oxford, thanks to the influence of his teacher at Bishops, John Badminton, and his piano teacher Lamar Crowson, and a single-minded approach that classical composition was his future.

Composition wasn’t always meant to be his future … before Grant made up his mind to be a composer at the age of 11, he was going to be an astronomer (because he lived next to an observatory) then an architect (because he loved the house the family moved to), but that journey was also not far fetched because he sees the three areas as all being to do with space. He was 11 when he wrote his first piece, for piano.

His journey included teaching in London, and singing daily Evensong at Chichester Cathedral, where Richard Cock was assistant organist for a time.

It was sheer chance that set Grant off on film music, (his sister is a film director) and over some 30 years he composed many scores for documentaries and films for channels such as BBC, Discovery and National Geographic and including music for 120 wildlife documentaries, “for every imaginable creature, including condors, whales, cheetahs, lions, leopards, tigers, hyaenas, wild dogs, dugongs, penguins, sharks, baboons and elephants,” he says.

Atmospheric journey

Among them is the hard-hitting film on sex trafficking in Australia, The Jammed, and Ocean Voyager, a Discovery Special about humpbacked whales, which was performed live in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with voice over by Meryl Streep. For his 70th next year he would love the CPO to play it live on stage to screen at the City Hall!  You can watch the Ocean Voyager finale below.

Click on the following for the video https://youtu.be/C6K4Jfplvuw?feature=shared

The Silence of the Day is something special. Its genesis came about after giving a recital at Old Nectar with double bassist Leon Bosch, with whom he has had a long association. At that recital he met Theo Magongoma and his agent Linda Farlam and the idea of a song cycle with baritone, double bass and piano was born. Before The Silence of the Day had been completed Leon had secured a premiere date at the Wigmore Hall, with South African pianist Tessa Uys. Grant read 500 poems before settling on the six – two by the late Stephen Watson, two by Archie Swanson, who will be at the concert (grandson of Walter Swanson), and two by Mxolisi Nyezwa. It was premiered in May 2023 at the Wigmore.

“The poems describe three different sides of natural history,” he says. “The music of the opening song depicts the waves on a Southern Cape beach, and silence (taken from from both Swanson’s and Watson’s poems) became a theme, poignant, leading from stillness of the sea into the dark world of human suffering as described in Nyezwa’s poems.”

Silence and sound

Grant always had an orchestration of the work in mind, and a discussion with the CEO and Artistic Director of the CPO, Louis Heyneman, allowed him to bring those plans to fruition, along with some funding from the SAMRO Music Creation Support Fund.

Martin Panteleev, who is conducting the premiere, says: “The Silence of the Day is an atmospheric journey where pure and sincere musical beauty embraces the written word, carrying us through moments of radiant stillness and into depths of dark, dramatic intensity. To premiere this remarkable work with my beloved Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra is to let its poetry breathe among the mountains and sea, where silence and sound find their truest resonance.”

Grant lectures composition at UCT, along with harmony, theory and orchestration. He will be part of the pre-concert talk on 18 September.

Source credit: https://weekendspecial.co.za/world-premiere-of-silence-of-the-day-by-grant-mclachlan/?fbclid=IwdGRzaAM3J9JjbGNrAzcntGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEeoobmbAMbnxS5yMJCGDgNW3VxaFXPBKc1rdGtgPaXqWRgvjHIp9UmmkjW1_U_aem_ODoG4up7Ti_Pz5omwDM4kw&sfnsn=scwspwa