Fortissimo Spring 2016 by Faber Music

FABER MUSIC NEWS — Spring 2016

fortissimo!

anders hillborg joins Faber

Plus Colin Matthews at 70 A George Benjamin premiere Thomas Adès awarded the Sonning Prize Nijinsky — the latest ballet from Carl Davis A new collaboration with Warp Publishing & Anna Meredith

Highlights • Tuning In • New Publications & Recordings • Music for Now • Publishing News

Colin Matthews at 70

Dear colleagues, 2015 was the year Faber Music celebrated 50 years in business. Now in 2016, in the year of his 70th birthday, we also celebrate 40 years of publishing the music of Colin Matthews. The strikingly selfless nature of this composer is apparent to all who encounter him: there are few young composers who have not in some way passed through his hands and benefited from his advice and encouragement; there are few composer colleagues who have not enjoyed his support via NMC, the recording company he founded, or in innumerable other ways; there are many public musical organisations who have appreciated his presence on their board (RPS, PRS, the Britten-Pears Foundation, the SPNM and the LSO’s Panufnik scheme, which this March celebrates its 10th anniversary of what it could not have achieved without Colin’s guiding hand. But we at Faber Music celebrate his composition: the large body of works flowing over the years has been varied, imaginative, challenging but always of a consistently high standard. His music has been welcomed by numerous groups and individual musicians and he has never been at a loss for commissions. Fluent and assured in so many genres, he has become the consummate craftsman whose music also has the power to move and surprise. Another significant birthday is that of Carl Davis, who celebrates his 80th birthday on 28 October. Unexpectedly maybe, he has a connection with Colin Matthews which goes back many years to the time when he employed both the young Matthews brothers to orchestrate many of his silent films! More on Davis’s undiminished energy and activity in the next newsletter. Whilst many Faber composers have been with the company for half a lifetime, there is always room for new arrivals – and we are thrilled to welcome Anders Hillborg who signed with us in September. More on Anders, his diverse and approachable music, and his standing in the international musical community, overleaf… Yours,

Sally Cavender Performance Music Director/Vice Chairman, Faber Music

Colin Matthews, who turned 70 in February, needs little introduction. The creator of an abundant and eclectic body of work, which often combines the exuberantly free with the mechanically driven, this master orchestrator now enjoys a prominent position at the very heart of British New Music. Underpinning his output’s rich stylistic diversity is an unparalleled sense of musical architecture, combining a forensic attention to detail with a lucid sense of overall dramatic form. From works which grapple with the legacy of Minimalism (Hidden Variables, 1989) to others which incorporate fragments by Matthews’s musical heroes, Sibelius and Mahler (Traces Remain, 2013), his fascinating work evidence of a composer aware of the complexity of his creative make-up, and unafraid to boldly engage with the past. From 1992-9 Matthews was Associate Composer with the LSO, a fruitful partnership which lead to many substantial works including a Cello Concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich. Later, he was Composer-in-Association with the Hallé Orchestra (2001-10) and is now their Composer Emeritus. International commissions include Berceuse for Dresden (2005) for the New York Philharmonic, Grand Barcarolle (2011) for the Leipzig Gewandhaus and his 2006 Turning Point for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. ‘The Isambard Kingdom Brunel of contemporary music: master of great time machines, steamy with energy derived from pulse and from massive, surging harmony, and openly displaying their structural engineering, all finished with a craftsman’s care.’ Paul Griffiths

Manchester Portrait Concerts In June Manchester will host a fascinating exploration of Matthews’s output by the Royal Northern College of Music in partnership with the BBC Philharmonic. Two student concerts will survey the entire breadth of the composer’s work, from the pugnacious ensemble works Contraflow (1992) and Hidden Variables to more private statements like his recent critically-acclaimed String Quartet No. 5 (2015). The two-day focus begins with a concert from the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Clark Rundell which pairs the iridescent Violin Concerto from 2009 (with Daniel Pioro as soloist) with the craggy orchestral scherzo Broken Symmetry (1993), a driving 20-minute score that Matthews still classes amongst his more successful works.

Highlights Colin Matthews Selected forthcoming performances

Birthday Tributes

Three of a kind

‘Wishing you the happiest of birthdays and thank you for such a suspenseful and atmospheric concerto.... My polyrhythmic skills are all the stronger thanks to you!’

15.3.16, David Josefowitz Recital Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London, UK: Jørgensen Trio

Traces Remain

Leila Josefowicz

Czech premiere 16.5.16, Smetana Hall, Prague, Czech Republic: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo

‘The immediate impact Colin’s music has had on me is the fantastic sense of drama he has, and this enormous energy that the music contains, and his way of using instruments, orchestrating, thick but always so audible and so clear…’

Violin Concerto/ Broken Symmetry 15.6.16, MediaCityUK, Salford, Greater Manchester, UK: Daniel Pioro/BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Clark Rundell

Magnus Lindberg

‘Happy Birthday Colin. What a milestone! You’re every conductor’s dream to work with, and I’m so thrilled to have worked with you on so many of your pieces. Thank you for all your wonderful music, and your support and humanity. Best wishes, for the next decade.’ Nicholas Collon

‘That Colin has succeeded in creating a very substantial – in every sense – body of music in tandem with his manifold “outside” activities as editor, orchestrator, record executive, mentor to countless young composers, exemplary musical citizen and activist would beggar belief had I not witnessed the phenomenon for myself at close quarters. The fact that he is turning seventy makes some kind of temporal sense of the scope of his achievement, even if it seems surreal to those of us who are lucky enough to be close to Colin and Belinda. We have been comrades-in-musical arms for forty years now – a relationship that began with me impulse-buying a score of his Fourth Sonata from Foyles because it looked like something I wished I’d written myself. That I was eventually able, some 15 years later, to record it together with Suns Dance and Broken Symmetry – whose premieres were milestones in my own “outside” life as a conductor – is something I’m still quietly as proud of as anything I’ve done in that capacity. It gives me real pleasure to send my dear colleague, friend and family-member the warmest possible wishes for a very Happy Birthday.’ Oliver Knussen

‘What has always attracted me to Colin’s music is he has that feistiness that you can find in the more recent British composers but also there’s a wonderful knowledge of the French repertoire. His music is very British but at the same time it has a luminosity, a delicacy and a sense of inner cohesion that you get with the great French masters.’ John Adams

‘Happy Birthday Colin! I felt so privileged to be part of your wonderful and moving No Man’s Land. More power to your elbow!‘ Ian Bostridge

PHOTO: colin matthews with benjamin britten and janet baker

Aldeburgh Focus Colin Matthews has a long association with Aldeburgh, going back to his time working as assistant to Benjamin Britten and Britten-Pears Composition Course. This summer’s festival includes the screening of a new film by Barrie Gavin. Taking its title from a Eugenio Montale poem that Matthews set in his lush and kaleidoscopic Continuum (2000), ‘Who knows, you can do it’ will feature an extended interview with the composer as well as contributions from many of his closest musical friends and collaborators. Oliver Knussen conducts the Britten Sinfonia in a performance of Matthews’s evocative and sombre Night Music (1977), whilst the Britten-Pears Contemporary Ensemble and Jonathan Berman present Flourish with Fireflies (2002) alongside the brilliantly imagined Two Tributes (1999). Another Festival highlight is sure to be a performance of Reflected Images (2003) by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ryan Wigglesworth. The 13-minute work was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas and its four parts (which play without a break) are inter-related. Matthews suggests that they ‘might be thought of as four different ways of looking at the same thing, although all are in some way elusive, almost as if what is being looked at is seen out of the corner of the eye’. The influence of Matthews’s masterful orchestrations of the Debussy Préludes is palpable, and each section has a title, although they, as in Debussy, are not revealed until the end.

Quatrain Another commission for Michael Tilson Thomas, this time for the opening of the LSO’s 1989 season, Matthews’s 10-minute Quatrain for wind, brass and percussion is a lucid, ferociously taut construction. Recently revived in a BBC Symphony Orchestra studio concert, this riveting work would sit well in a programme alongside Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments or Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

String Quartet No.5/ Contraflow/Hidden Variables/Five Concertinos 16.6.16, Royal Northern College of Music Concert Hall, Manchester, UK: Students from the Royal Northern College of Music/Mark Heron

Little Pavane/ Introduction, Chaconne & Corrente/Five Duos 16.6.16, Studio Theatre, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK: Students from the Royal Northern College of Music

Reflected Images 21.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, Suffolk, UK: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ryan Wigglesworth

Night Music 23.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, Suffolk, UK: Britten Sinfonia/ Oliver Knussen

Flourish with Fireflies/Two Tributes 24.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Britten Studio, Snape, Suffolk, UK: Britten-Pears Contemporary Ensemble/Jonathan Berman

No Man’s Land 9.7.16, Lichfield Festival, Lichfield Cathedral, Lichfield, UK: Robin Tritschler/Roderick Williams/ BBC National Orchestra of Wales/ Martyn Brabbins

Five Concertinos 17.7.16, Cheltenham Music Festival, Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham, UK: Berkeley Ensemble

The Pied Piper of Hamelin Australian premiere 9.10.16, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Sydney Children’s Choir/Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Toby Thatcher

Major Prizes for Adès and Benjamin

Anders Hillborg Faber Music is proud to announce the signing of an exclusive world-wide publishing agreement with leading Swedish composer Anders Hillborg. Hillborg is that rare artist whose music strikes a chord across many different countries and cultures. Born in Sweden in 1954, his early interest in electronic music developed from a beginning as a keyboard improviser in a pop band, but contact with Ferneyhough, and the music of Ligeti quickly led to a fascination with counterpoint and orchestral writing. Since then, Hillborg’s love of pure sound and the energy that he gives it, has appealed to many major conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Alan Gilbert, Sakari Oramo, Kent Nagano, David Zinman and Gustavo Dudamel, who have taken his music to orchestras across America and Europe.

Sonning Prize In October Thomas Adès joined the distinguished company of Kurtág, Ligeti, Messiaen and Stravinsky as a recipient of the prestigious Leonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark’s highest musical honour. Adès conducted the prize-giving concert which featured the Danish National Concert Choir and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in Asyla, America: A Prophecy and the Danish premiere of Totentanz, his gargantuan 35-minute work for mezzosoprano, baritone and orchestra from 2013. The concert marked the conclusion of a mini-festival in Copenhagen in which Adès performed alongside both the Danish String Quartet and the Athelas Sinfonietta conducted by Pierre-André Valade. In an interview with Andrew Mellor, Adès commented: ‘Everything about the prize is amazing, but the most amazing part is the concert I get to conduct with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Vocal Ensemble.’ He explained that he would use the money to buy ‘time and space to think. It won’t be frittered away. It will be spent on something that will make it more efficient for me to work somehow.’

Monaco Prize When it premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2012, George Benjamin’s Written on Skin was hailed by Le Monde as ‘the best opera since Wozzeck’. Now the opera has been awarded the illustrious triennial Composition Prize of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. This is the latest in a string of accolades which also includes the ‘Grand Prix Du Syndicat de la critique 2013 – Opera’ in France, Opernwelt’s 2013 Premiere of the Year 2013 in Germany, the 2014 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Opera, and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Large-Scale Composition Award in May 2014. Benjamin was appointed a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ambassador in September 2015, and has just been made a Fellow of King’s College London. Explore the full score of Benjamin’s Written on Skin at the Faber Music Online Score Library: scorelibrary.fabermusic.com

photo: Thomas Adès © Agnete Schlichtkrull

Peacock Tales, Hillborg’s theatrical clarinet concerto for Martin Fröst, displays another strand of his large and varied output: a sense of humour and the absurd. The piece has been taken up with enthusiasm in several different versions and has received a staggering number of performances. Mouyayoum for 16-voice a cappella choir is one of his most popular works, riffing on a rhythmically complex spectrum of overtone series unadorned with words. Here, as always Hillborg’s ear for the subtleties of the voice and his natural lyricism are unmistakable. Above all, his music is borne out of a refreshing stylistic freedom matched by an innate communicative ability. With each passing year, Hillborg’s international reputation grows apace. In recent months his music has been performed in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Minnesota, Taiwan, Seoul, Amsterdam, Vienna, Munich and Hamburg (where he is Composer in Residence with the NDR). An extensive discography (at least 24 recordings) includes four portrait discs. Recently recorded by Decca, Hillborg’s atmospheric song cycle for Renée Fleming, The Strand Settings, received a rapturous reception in London, whilst the UK premiere of Beast Sampler at the 2015 BBC Proms led Richard Morrison in The Times to pronounce: ‘Spectralism writ large: more please.’ In February Hillborg was awarded the Swedish Government’s 2015 Music Export Prize, an award more usually reserved for Pop and Rock artists, in recognition of his extraordinary international reach.

A new work for Asko|Schönberg An energetic virtuoso showcase for 18 players, Scream Sing Whisper was premiered by the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble and Christian Karlsen in November at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw. Hillborg’s second work for ensemble (the first being his riotously colourful Vaporized Tivoli written for Ensemble Modern in 2010) the 23-minute work sets raucous ensemble unisons against towering spectral sonorities which carve out vast sonic vistas.

Looking Ahead Hillborg is currently at work on a Violin Concerto (his second) for Lisa Batiashvili commissioned by the Stockholm Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Minnesota and Seoul Philharmonic orchestras, to be premiered in October 2016. Other projects include a companion to Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto for Pekka Kuusisto and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard, to be premiered in early 2017.

Highlights

‘Sirens’ beguiles the critics The latest all-Hillborg release from BIS records received a rapturous reception from critics both in the UK and abroad. Two purely orchestral works, Beast Sampler and Cold Heat, frame the exquisite song O Dessa Ögon for soprano and strings, and demonstrate Hillborg’s expert handling of his favourite instrument: the orchestra, often described by him as a ‘sound animal’. Sirens, the disc’s culminating work, is Hillborg’s largest work to date in terms of both scoring and duration. Inspired by the dangerous yet alluring sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, Hillborg has constructed an evocative 30-minute score in which the sirens (two soprano soloists and a large mixed choir) attempt with increasing desperation to manipulate Ulysses. Performing this colourful programme is the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Hillborg’s faithful musical companions, joined by the sopranos Ida Falk Winland and Hannah Holgersson and two of Sweden’s foremost choirs, the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir and the Swedish Radio Choir. As on a previous disc of Hillborg’s music, the acclaimed Eleven Gates, the performances are led by three different conductors: the eminent trio of Sakari Oramo, David Zinman and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all dedicatees of the works they conduct here.

‘O Dessa Ögon for soprano and strings is a perfectly restrained, exquisite miniature in which the solo voice climbs ever higher over comfortingly tonal strings… Sirens creates a dreamlike atmosphere, wonderfully paced, as if Odysseus’s encounter was purely a product of his imagination… There seems to be no doubt that orchestras enjoy playing Hillborg’s music.’ The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 27 January 2016

‘If your mental image of contemporary music is of something hard-edged and indigestible, this CD will come as a pleasant surprise… Hillborg weaves elaborate soundscapes, sometimes made from scattered points of sound, like an audio version of a pointillist painting, other times from vast clusters which can sound uncannily like electronic music. [The conductors] know how to project the emotional heat lying under the music’s diaphanous surface… Sirens is an affecting piece which, like Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde before it, shows music’s power to evoke the dark connection between sex and death.’ The Daily Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 9 January 2016

‘If your mental image of contemporary music is of something hard-edged and indigestible, this CD will come as a pleasant surprise’ ‘Sirens beguiles… the hypnotic score builds from pulsating pedal notes to a ghostly reverie… the zippy Beast Sampler boasts a wild tangle of blaring sonorities.’ The Times (Neil Fisher), 5 February 2016

‘Hillborg makes wonders with the standard tools of contemporary music. Clusters, glittering spectral chords and whirling patterns from the winds make the orchestra a surrealistic being which draws the listener into its hypnotic world…’ Helsingin Sanomat (Jukka Isopuro), 13 January 2016

PHOTO: anders hillborg © Mats Lundqvist

George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song

A beguiling 20-minute work for countertenor, women’s voices and orchestra, Dream of the Song, Benjamin’s first work since his ground-breaking opera Written on Skin, was premiered in September at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw by the countertenor Bejun Mehta, the Netherlands Chamber Choir and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by its composer. Employing a reduced orchestra (two oboes, four horns, two percussionists and two harps and strings), the work sets verse by three major poets who spent formative years in Granada; two Hebrew poets of mid-11th century, Samuel HaNagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol (sung by solo countertenor in English versions by Peter Cole), and Gabriel García Lorca (sung by the female chorus in the original Spanish). The volatile and frenetic first movement ‘The Pen’ displays the remarkable, transparent density which has become one of Benjamin’s hallmarks; blaring horns cut through an intricate web of string textures, whilst the countertenor’s florid melismas recall Upon Silence (a quite different mode from Benjamin’s operatic style). The soundworld of the opera is more apparent elsewhere, whilst the baleful gongs and lacerating string harmonies of the fourth movement for women’s voices and orchestra only, which sets an incendiary passage of Lorca, owe something to the last of the Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra. From the purely instrumental musics superimposed in Palimpsests to Written on Skin where ‘the white lines of the Saturday car park cover the heaped up dead’, the layering and interaction of past and present has been a recurring preoccupation for Benjamin. The inspired pairing of texts in this new work creates a rich, melancholy and strange poetic conjunction, expressed most beautifully in the final movement which, overlaying soloist and choir, offers two simultaneous visions of dawn, conceived a millennium apart.

‘The music is fluid and layered… The most powerful section is the fourth, where the choir – in cutting long tones – declaim above stacked dissonances.’ De Volkskrant (Frits van der Waa), 28 September 2015

‘Perfectly structured music of great beauty’ ‘Perfectly structured music of great beauty, fleet-footed and profound, varied and thoughtful… From the virtuosically poetical opening song to the concluding ode to daybreak, the fluid melodic lines fitted Mehta’s bronzed voice like a glove. Benjamin possesses a passionate, almost fanatical, gift for tone colour… The reduced orchestra sounds mysterious and silvery, with an occasional well-placed punch from the horns or a plaintive oboe melody. The interaction between voice, choir and instruments was reminiscent of the game of sunlight on water, with fish just below the surface: sometimes you know exactly what you heard, and then the sounds subtly and inimitably flowed together again.’ NRC Handelsblad (Joe Stack), 28 September 2015

Dream of the Song will receive its US premiere at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music on 25 July with Daniel Moody, the Lorelei Ensemble and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra under Stefan Asbury. The work then travels to the Festival d’Automne in Paris on 28 September with Bejun Mehta the SWR Vokalensemble and Orchestre de Paris conducted by Daniel Harding.

My heart thinks as the sun comes up that what it does is wise as earth borrows its light, as pledge it takes the stars. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, trans. Peter Cole

Commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw, BBC and Boston Symphony Orchestras and the Festival d’Automne, the work receives its UK premiere on 18 March with Iestyn Davies, the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen.

photo: george benjamin and bejun Mehta in rehearsals at the concertgebouw © renske Vrolijk

Highlights

Singing the Body Electric: Whitman in Music

Optimistic, corporeal and radically free, the poetic voice of Walt Whitman has inspired an extraordinary number of composers. There is something inherently musical about the writing of this American master, who styled himself more as a singer or bard than as a man of letters. Ahead of the bicentenary of Whitman’s birth in 2019, fortissimo takes a look at six diverse musical responses to his work.

Julian Anderson – Sea Drift A world away from Delius’s work of the same name or, indeed, Per Norgard’s 1978 version for soprano and ensemble, Anderson’s bracing, windswept setting of lines from ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ displays terrific energy and economy of gesture. Scored for soprano, flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet and piano, the 10-minute work begins by allowing the effulgence of Whitman’s words to speak for themselves, though towards the end the music grows ever more rich and resonant.

Tansy Davies – As With Voices and With Tears Davies’s mesmerising requiem for SATB choir, strings and electronics is a setting of the ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’, which concerns the double grave for a father and son killed side by side in combat. Both arresting and mysterious in effect, this moving 23-minute work is a powerful meditation on war, and would make a fascinating contemporary pairing with the Mozart Requiem or Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli. ‘While bells, birdsong and footsteps murmur in and out in electronic interjections, singers and orchestra move as separate flocks on the wing, forming and reforming in shapes that stream across the desolate landscape of the poem.’ The Observer (Stephen Pritchard), 21 November 2010

Carl Davis – On the Beach at Night Alone For musical polymath Carl Davis there is no poet quite like Whitman. ‘So many of his works have a fantastic energy and what I can only describe as uplift and vision’ the composer effuses. All these endearing qualities are evident in Davis’s 7-minute setting of ‘On the Beach at Night Alone’, for baritone, chorus and orchestra. Beginning atmospherically with a rocking lullaby with wordless chorus, the music lifts as Whitman looks towards the future, opening out into a jubilant, cosmic celebration.

Oliver Knussen – Whitman Settings Originally composed for voice and piano in 1991, this 12-minute collection of four songs were later orchestrated to create one of the most intricate and kaleidoscopic scores Knussen has created to date, deploying large forces in textures which are often delicate and shimmering. The opening song ‘When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer’, develops the thrilling heterophonic textures found in Flourish with Fireworks. ‘These characteristically powerful but unusually short poems of Whitman attracted me because they deal with grand natural phenomena on small canvases’ says Knussen, who describes the work as ‘a concise four-movement symphony that muses on things in space or sky.’ ‘A treat… As in his operas, Knussen displays a rare feeling for word-setting and graceful melodic writing.’ The Sunday Times (Hugh Canning), 23 June 1991

‘Exultant and glittering.’ The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 4 August 1994

Ralph Vaughan Williams – Nocturnes In 1908 Vaughan Williams composed the Nocturnes for baritone and orchestra – each a setting of his favourite poet Whitman – though these works were believed to be unfinished. The manuscript of an earlier Nocturne, a fully orchestrated setting of ‘Whispers of Heavenly Death’, came to light in 2000. Now, Faber Music is proud to announce the publication of the Three Nocturnes, which sees Vaughan Williams’s completed work framed by two completions by Anthony Payne. The Nocturnes have been recorded by Roderick Williams and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins, to be released on Albion Records in June 2016.

Carl Vine – Wonders Wonders, a new choral cantata from Carl Vine will be premiered at the Sydney Opera House in September 2016. Commissioned by Sydney Philharmonia Choirs for a concert which also includes the Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony, the work sets Whitman’s ‘Who Learns My Lesson Complete?’ and will feature prominent solos for soprano and baritone. Vine comments he was drawn to ‘the general idea of wonderment’ that the poem captures.

photos: tansy davies © Rikard Österlund; carl davis © Trevor Leighton; oliver knussen © Hana Zushi-Rhodes, Royal Academy of Music; carl vine © keith saunders; walt whitman

Jonathan Harvey Selected forthcoming performances

Jonathan Harvey Forms of Emptiness

Climbing Frame

Thirty years on from its premiere, Harvey’s choral tour de force Forms of Emptiness continues to receive performances internationally. The Swedish Radio Choir and Kaspars Putnins perform it in April, and we are pleased to announce a new edition is currently in preparation.

4.3.16, Kings Place, London, UK: London Sinfonietta/CoMA London/ CoMA Sussex/Gregory Rose

Chant 4.3.16, Salle Paul Dardier, Mirepoix, France: Louis Merlet

In this imaginative and multi-layered work, the main a cappella choir (often divided and employing internal conductors) sings three poems by E. E. Cummings at different speeds and tonalities, referencing numerous sacred musics of the past from chant to Palestrina and even Messiaen. Against these vivid flashes of joy and colour is set the Buddhist Heart Sutra (with overtone singing à la Stockhausen’s Stimmung) performed by a quartet of soloists in the original Sanskrit. At times a speaking voice simultaneously intones the same text in English.

String Quartet No. 2 5.3.16, Kings Place, London, UK: Arditti Quartet

From Silence 9.3.16, Art-Industry Museum, Brno, Czech Republic: Irena Troupova/Brno Contempory Orchestra/Pavel Snajdr

Vajra Singaporean premiere 11.3.16, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music; 10.4.16, Recital Studio, University of Singapore: Singapore Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music New Music Ensemble/Léo Warynski Wheel of Emptiness 2.4.16, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Nieuw Ensemble/Ed Spanjaard

Death of Light, Light of Death 28.4.16, Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona, Spain: Ensemble intercontemporain/ Pablo Rus 5-6.5.16, Philharmonie, Cologne, Germany: Ensemble intercontemporain/Tito Ceccherini

String Quartet No. 4 29.4.16, Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theatre, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA: JACK Quartet

Forms of Emptiness/ The Angels 29.4.16, Engelbrekts Church, Stockholm, Sweden: Swedish Radio Choir/Kaspars Putnins

Tranquil Abiding 7.5.16, Philharmonie, Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany: WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/ Matthias Pintscher

Moving Trees 17.5.16, Philharmonie 2, Paris; 24.6.16, La Filature, Scène nationale, Mulhouse, France: Orchestre Philharmonique de Mulhouse

Bird Concerto with Pianosong 3.6.16, Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, York, UK: Chimera Ensemble/Anna Czepiel

Tombeau de Messiaen 8.7.16, Cheltenham Music Festival, Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK: Zubin Kanga

Harvey’s Cello Jonathan Harvey’s cello has been donated to his alma mater St John’s College, Cambridge where it will be made available to students at the University’s Faculty of Music. Margaret Faultless, Musician-in-Residence at St John’s College and Director of Performance at the Faculty of Music, said: ‘Harvey had a long association with St John’s, eventually becoming an Honorary Fellow, and the thought of the cello being in College again is very exciting… Jonathan’s family are very keen that the instrument should be played.’ Harvey was a skilled cellist, even playing in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for a number of years. His knowledge of the instrument, and his skill and adeptness in writing for it, is evident throughout his oeuvre, from the early Dialogue for cello and piano (1965) and pioneering works involving electronics including Advaya (1994), to the late Cello Octet (2008). Forever seeking to expand the sounds available to him, Harvey often modified the instrument; each of his Three Sketches (1989) requires a different scordatura whilst in The Summer Cloud’s Awakening for choir, flute, cello and live electronics (2001) the player doubles an amplified ‘prepared cello’ with two G strings and two C strings all tuned down an octave. Amongst Harvey’s greatest works for the instrument is the Cello Concerto (1990 rev. 2005), a luminous 20-minute movement in which the soloist is wreathed in a halo of sound from a Messiaen-like concertante group comprising tuned percussion, electric keyboard, celesta and harp. There is little trace of the usual ‘heroic’ concerto soloist here: at once virtuoso and delicate, the cellist eschews a series of earthy outbursts from the orchestra, and is elevated to higher, more rarefied plains. For promotional sound files please contact promotion@fabermusic.com

Photo: jonathan harvey © maurice foxall

The resulting 13-minute work is both thrillingly audacious and sincere, with joyous clouds of voices coalescing effortlessly into mysterious, hushed homophonies. ‘Visionary and beautiful… Harvey has a wonderful ear for textures and sonorities… a poetic architect.’ The New Yorker (Andrew Porter), 10 February 1992

Later, in 1997, Harvey revisited similar concepts in another composition dedicated to James Wood – Wheel of Emptiness for sixteen players – which the Nieuw Ensemble and Ed Spanjaard perform in Amsterdam this March.

A new recording from Musikfabrik Long-standing supporters of Harvey’s music, ensemble Musikfabrik have recently released the premiere recording of his last work for ensemble: Sringāra Chaconne for 15 players (2009). This 14-minute work – full of ravishing, glittering textures conjured from four gentle chords which rise slowly through many transmutations – is a typical example the composer’s fusion of Western culture and Eastern philosophy. There are a number of more objective events which repeat – like the chaconne of the title – whilst Sringāra is an Indian rasa (‘flavour/mood’) signifying a love-essence which, according to Hindu belief, is at the beginning of all art.

TUNING IN

Carl Vine

Matthew Hindson A Fourth Quartet Hindson’s latest work is his String Quartet No. 4, for string quartet and percussion. The two-movement, 20-minute composition is the result of a commission from the Australian String Quartet, who toured the work with virtuoso Claire Edwardes throughout Australia in February and March. This followed their successful tour of his String Quartet No. 3: Ngeringa in 2015 (also commissioned for the group). Reviews to follow.

Willoughby SO residency

A new anthem Verbum Caro Factum Est, a 5-minute anthem for unaccompanied double choir was premiered by the choir of St George’s Cathedral, Perth, in December. Vine’s response to the opening words of St John’s Gospel is powerfully atmospheric, with rich, burnished harmonies capturing all the awe and strangeness of the Nativity. This is Vine’s first choral work since his popular Ring Out, Wild Bells – a rhythmically vital setting of Tennyson – which was premiered as part of the King’s College Cambridge 2012 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Whilst these two works inhabit very different emotional worlds, both display Vine’s trademark lyricism and emotional directness.

A tribute to Judith Wright Vine has written a song for low voice and string quartet for ‘With Love and Fury’, a project uniting Australian singer-songwriter Katie Noonan and the Brodsky Quartet, in a celebration of the renowned Australian poet Judith Wright (1915-2000). The project’s title reflects the typically ardent phrase that Wright, who championed Aboriginal rights and environmental issues throughout her life, used to sign off her correspondence. Vine chose to set ‘The Slope’, from Wright’s 1973 collection ‘Alive’, for what he describes as ‘the power of its poetic imagery as well as for its expansive humanitarian message’. The 5-minute song will feature in a 7-date Australian tour in late March, coinciding with the project’s release on disc.

Trombone Concerto Inspired by Oliver Sacks’s fascinating exploration of atypical mental states ‘Hallucinations’, Vine’s Trombone Concerto will be premiered this October by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and James Gaffigan. The soloist will be renowned Australian trombonist, and long-time member of the Chicago Symphony, Michael Mulcahy. Each movement of the 20-minute concerto is based on a different hallucination, from the ominous ‘Doppelgänger’ to rather absurd ‘The lemonade speaks.’ An Australian premiere is scheduled for 2017.

Photo: carl vine © Karen Steains

Hindson is Composer-in-Residence with the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra throughout 2016. One of Australia’s leading regional professional orchestras, the WSO has at its helm as Artistic Director and Chief Conductor, Nicholas Milton (also Chief Conductor of the Canberra SO, and of the Orchestra of the Saarländischen Staatstheater in Germany). The new relationship launches on 16 April when WSO are joined by the Caro String Quartet for a performance of Hindson’s unique take on Schubert’s last quartet, The Rave and the Nightingale (conducted by Alexander Briger). Later in the season they perform his flute concerto, House Music (soloist Virginia Taylor), the pot-boiling orchestral opener Boom-Box, and Bright Red Overture.

‘House Music’ on Australia Day The premiere recording of Hindson’s flute concerto, House Music, received its first Australian broadcast earlier this year. It formed part of a special Australia Day broadcast on Radio National on 26 January, and was immediately preceded by the official Australia Day Address. Alexa Still was the soloist, with Raphael Jiménez conducting the Oberlin Orchestra.

In the Studio Husband and wife piano duo Pascal and Ami Rogé are no strangers to the music of Hindson. They commissioned his Double Piano Concerto as a wedding present to themselves and premiered it with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy in the Sydney Opera House in 2011. The Rogés have now taken up Hindson’s earlier, outrageous Pulse Magnet for two pianos and two percussionists. Having performed it live in the UK, USA and France, it now features on their new Onyx Classics album alongside works by Bartók and Ravel. ‘A wacky, up-front, fun piece whose outer sections make no attempt to pretend otherwise… Its longer and slower central movement offers gorgeously chiming sonorities and note-patterns that mesmerise the ear.’ Sinfini Music (Malcolm Hayes), 21 December 2015

In February, sessions took place in Hobart for an allHindson orchestral CD, to be released by ABC Classics as part of its Australian Composer Series. Benjamin Northey conducted the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Carl Vine Selected forthcoming performances The Slope World premiere 28.4.16, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane; 29.4.16, Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne; 30.4.16, Canberra International Music Festival, Fitters’ Workshop, Canberra, Australia: Katie Noonan/ Brodsky String Quartet (touring, 7 performances)

Wonders World premiere 22, 24.9.16, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Sydney Philharmonia Choirs

Trombone Concerto ‘Five Hallucinations’ World premiere 6-8.10.16, Symphony Center, Chicago, IL, USA: Michael Mulcahy/ Chicago Symphony Orchestra/ James Gaffigan

Matthew Hindson Selected forthcoming performances The Rave and the Nightingale 16-17.4.16, The Concourse, Willoughby, NSW, Australia: Caro String Quartet/Willoughby Symphony Orchestra/Alexander Briger

Little Chrissietina’s Magic Fantasy 26, 29.5.16, Pyatt Hall, Vancouver, BC, Canada: members of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

Requiem for a City (by Paul Mac & Matthew Hindson) 28.5.16, Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Wind Symphony/Kevin Cameron 9.7.16, Concordia College Chapel, Highgate, SA, Australia: Adelaide Wind Orchestra/Bryan Griffiths

House Music 18-19.6.16, The Concourse, Willoughby, NSW, Australia: Virginia Taylor/Willoughby Symphony Orchestra/Stephen Mould

Boom-Box 30-31.7.16, The Concourse, Willoughby, NSW, Australia: Willoughby Symphony Orchestra/ Nicholas Milton

This Year’s Apocalypse World premiere 4.10.16, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Verbrugghen Ensemble/John Lynch

Carl Davis Selected forthcoming performances

Carl Davis

Speedy 4.3.16, Tobias Theater, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA: Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra/Matthew Kraemer

The Count/The Floorwalker 19.3.16, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Luxembourg: Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg/ Carl Davis

The General 22.3.16, Zagreb Film Festival, Cinema Europa, Zagreb, Croatia: Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra/ Krešimir Batinic

Nijinsky 24.3, 3.6.16, Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava, Slovakia: Orchestra of the Slovak National Theatre/Carl Davis/ chor. Daniel de Andrade

Kid Auto Races in Venice 8.4.16, Corn Exchange, Bedford; 10.4.16, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: Philharmonia Orchestra/Carl Davis

Ben-Hur 13.5.16, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, UK: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Carl Davis

Aladdin 11-19.6.16, New National Theatre, Tokyo, Japan: New National Theatre Ballet/chor. David Bintley/Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra/Paul Murphy

Napoléon 6.11.16, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: Philharmonia Orchestra/Carl Davis

God of the Dance

‘Napoléon’ – a new restoration

What better subject for a new full-length ballet from Carl Davis than the complex and dramatic life of one of the artform’s greatest stars – Vaslav Nijinsky. Choreographed by Daniel de Andrade with co-direction from Patricia Doyle, Nijinsky – God of the Dance opened in November at the Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava to a rave reception. Lavishly produced, with sets and costumes by Mark Bailey, this remarkable work has few parallels in terms of its complexity – it includes off stage choir, an actor reading Nijinsky’s diaries, and projections of documentary footage from World War I.

The BFI has announced details of a new chapter in the remarkable history of Napoléon, Abel Gance’s 51/2-hour silent epic, which was feared lost until the film historian Kevin Brownlow set about piecing it together by tracking down surviving prints more than 60 years ago.

Musically, the whole work unfolds as a set of variations on Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 in C minor (to which Nijinsky danced his last public performance in 1919) and also includes popular music from the pre-World War I era when Nijinsky was active including tango, ragtime, samba and rumba. The score is marinated in the repertoire of the Ballets Russes, including Scheherazade, Le Sacre du Printemps (complete with a riot!), and Giselle, which Nijinsky famously performed with Anna Pavlova. In one of the most spectacular set pieces, Nijinsky is crowned Tsar of the Ballet to music from the Coronation Scene of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.

A new digital version of the film will be shown in cinemas and made available on DVD and Blu-ray as well as on the BFI Player this autumn, accompanied by Davis’s groundbreaking score, written for the then partially restored film’s screening at the London Film Festival in 1980. In November the film, which dramatises Napoléon’s youth and early career, will be screened at the Festival Hall with Davis’s score – the longest ever composed for a silent film – performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the composer. Heather Stewart, the BFI’s Creative Director, ‘Napoléon is a landmark in the history of cinema and we are grateful to all of the great talents who have helped us along the way but especially, of course, Kevin Brownlow for his indefatigable championing of the film and Carl Davis for his amazing score.’

Tracing Nijinsky’s life from early childhood and student years, to his complex relationship with Diaghilev, worldwide recognition and fame, and his ongoing struggle with mental illness, this compelling work sees Davis at the peak of his powers. A revival is already being planned

Celebrations It’s hard to believe it from his boundless energy onstage, but later this year Carl Davis turns 80. A special publication celebrating his life in music is in preparation and will be released to coincide with his birthday in October. A full tribute will follow in the Autumn edition of fortissimo.

photos: nijinsky at the Slovak National Theatre © PETER BRENKUS; still from Napoléon

TUNING IN

Oliver Knussen Nicholas Daniel records ‘Cantata’ Shortly after working with Knussen last October, the Britten Oboe Quartet (Nicholas Daniel and other members of Britten Sinfonia) recorded Knussen’s elegiacal Cantata. Due for release on Harmonia Mundi later this year, this is the second recording to date. Inhabiting the vivid harmonic world of the Third Symphony, this compact ten-minute work for oboe and string trio ranges from a wild, elaborately ornamented climax to a poignant, rocking lullaby of great tenderness.

Revisiting ‘Ophelia Dances’

Britten Sinfonia The Britten Sinfonia has long been an advocate of Oliver Knussen’s music – performing everything from his glittering chamber works through to the operas Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop! – but a series of two London concerts in October marked the first time the composer has conducted the orchestra himself. Works by Mozart and Berg framed Knussen’s deeply personal Requiem – Songs for Sue for soprano and ensemble (2006), whilst his Violin Concerto (2002) was presented alongside masterpieces by Stravinsky and Tippett. ‘Death shadows Knussen’s Violin Concerto in the bell strokes that frame it... The glitter and rattle and dewy flourishes of tuned percussion, trilling flutes and muted trumpets between those bells tilts between menace and delight as soloist and orchestra travel from wordless recitative to the melancholy of a slow dance and the hedonism of a gigue.’ The Times (Anna Picard), 30 October 2015

photo: oliver knussen ©maurice foxall

One of Knussen’s most popular works, the dazzling Ophelia Dances (1975) was revived in March by the LPO Foyle Future First Scheme under Ben Gernon. Knussen has long been fascinated by Ophelia and states that here he ‘wanted to write a piece whose light-headed and giddy qualities would suggest a crossing of the line that divides laughter from tears.’ The 8-minute work for nine instruments derives much of its material from Schumann’s Carnaval and two late works of Debussy, La boîte à joujoux and ‘Gigues’ from Images. An introduction sets up four dances (each more compressed than the last) before the momentum collapses, heralding a poignant coda with an eloquent solo horn wreathed in shimmering celesta.

Oliver Knussen Selected forthcoming performances Higglety Pigglety Pop! 4,6.3.16, Sosnoff Theater, The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA: Bard College

Ophelia Dances Book 1 5.3.16, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: Foyle’s Future Firsts/LPO Players/Ben Gernon

Autumnal 7.3.16, National Sawdust, New York, NY, USA: Members of the New York Philharmonic

Horn Concerto 1-2.4.16, Performing Arts Center, Concord, MA, USA: Richard Sebring/ Concord Orchestra/Richard Pittman

The Way to Castle Yonder 7.10.16, LG Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea: Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra/Antony Hermus

‘The perfect miniature from the best ears in the business. Beautiful textures, and every note counts. I heard this for the first time more than 30 years ago while studying with Knussen and I still marvel at its mastery.’ Mark-Anthony Turnage The Guardian, 26 April 2012

The work received its Mexican premiere at the Cervantino Festival in October with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Christian Karlsen. In February Karlsen conducted the work again in Luleå, Sweden with the Norrbottens Kammerorkester in a programme which also included the National Premiere of Knussen’s Hums and Songs of Winnie the Pooh.

Tansy Davies Selected forthcoming performances

Tansy Davies Publication of ‘Nature’

Feather and Groove 4.3.16, Kings Place, London, UK: London Sinfonietta/CoMA London/ CoMA Sussex/Gregory Rose

salt box 5.3.16, Kings Place, London, UK: London Sinfonietta

Falling Angel London premiere 1.6.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: London Sinfonietta/ Martyn Brabbins

new work for four horns and orchestra world premiere 21.2.17, The Anvil, Basingstoke; 22.2.17, St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Wales, 23.2.17, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: Philharmonia Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen US premiere 27, 29.4.17, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City, NY, USA: New York Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen

Opera to song Last heard at Oslo’s Ultima festival in 2013 in a version for voice and Indian harmonium, Song of Pure Nothingness was premiered in a new incarnation at the University of St Andrews in February by countertenor Andrew Watts and Huw Watkins. Written for Watts, who created the role of the Shaman in Davies’s 2015 opera Between Worlds, it formed the dramatic centrepiece of a portrait concert which also included grind show (electric) and inside out 2, as well as a conversation with the writer Michael Faber. Like Troubairitz, this song is a product of Davies’s fascination with the Troubadours. The 11th-century poem by Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine is a kind of riddle and, asked why she keeps revisiting it, Davies commented ‘I think it has a lot meaning for me in the psychological sense; I see myself in it and perhaps it works on me like a mirror reflecting back unknowable secrets, unearthing hidden pain and bringing dark things into the light, all the while supported by a hidden inner strength. It’s also funny, and completely without melodrama, which I find very attractive.’

The Second Key If Davies’s latest setting of the Song of Pure Nothingness is operatic in feel, an earlier response to the same poem – The Second Key – is almost a Blues, even featuring a steel-string guitar. Written for Elaine Mitchener, whose supple voice freely crosses boundaries between styles, the work was a commission from Contemporary Music for Amateurs. Davies had in mind ‘an imaginary CoMA course where a rock guitar player might want to play alongside classical musicians, and I hope this piece could work for that scenario. I also like to think that a guitar-playing singer might like to perform both parts together too, like a true troubadour.’ A revised version of the work premiered in March as part of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s CoMA weekend, conducted by Michael Finnissy. A recording of another CoMA commission, the open score work Feather and Groove, features on a new release from the London Sinfonietta and CoMA on NMC. 12

Brilliantly imaginative, and packed full of glistening, ever-changing ensemble textures, Nature sees Davies craft yet another thrilling and wholly distinctive soundworld. Commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in 2012, Davies’s gloriously offbeat reimagining of the concerto form for piano and ten instruments teems with invention. This 20-minute work was inspired by shamanic rituals and the supernatural, and Davies describes the piano as ‘part moth, part Maenad’. Piano and harp are sometimes uncannily grafted together in gossamer two-part counterpoint, and there is a feral quality to much of the tumultuous solo writing – all hyperactive trills and gutsy bass eruptions, shot through with rare and unexpected moments of calm. After a wild cadenza (revised for this new edition) the music’s trajectory begins to change, and ends by drifting gracefully up into silence.

photo: tansy davies © Rikard Österlund

The full score of Nature, priced at £24.99, is available from fabermusicstore.com (ISBN 0-571-53932-7)

From one horn player to another Davies’s own instrument, the horn, has always occupied a special place in her music – buzzing away abrasively in her Falling Angel for ensemble, or crying out with yearning in her orchestral labyrinth Wild Card – but it will be especially spotlighted in her next major project, a concerto for four horns and orchestra. Co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra and the Warsaw Autumn Festival (where Davies’s trumpet concerto Spiral House was received with acclaim in 2014) the 20-minute work was the brainchild of Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will conduct the premiere and who is himself a horn player. Davies is also writing a solo horn work for Musikfabrik’s Christine Chapman.

TUNING IN

Tom Coult

Peter Sculthorpe

Tom Coult Selected forthcoming performances Sonnet Machine World premiere 23.4.16, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Gourlay

New work World premiere 1.6.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: London Sinfonietta/ Martyn Brabbins

Peter Sculthorpe Selected forthcoming performances

Sonnet Machine

Island Songs

Energetic, ambitious and playful, Coult’s latest orchestral work Sonnet Machine will be premiered by the BBC Philharmonic and Andrew Gourlay this April before being heard on Radio 3 as incidental music to a Shakespeareinspired radio play by Tom Wells. Recalling Alan Turing’s fascination with the idea of machines writing sonnets, Coult describes the piece as ‘a creative misunderstanding of sonnet form – 14 bits of music that ‘‘rhyme’’ in various ways, as if an early computer had arbitrarily applied the rules of sonnet form to a piece of music.’

Sculthorpe’s Island Songs for saxophone, strings and percussion (2012) were among his last works. Drawing on indigenous melodies from Australia’s far north, the two-movement work contains some of his most beguilingly lyrical music as well as a potent ecological message. On a critically acclaimed new recording of the work from Sony Classics, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conductor Benjamin Northey are joined by the soloist for whom it was written, the twice Grammy-nominated Amy Dickson. Poignant and melodious, the 18-minute work also exists in a version for two pianos and didjeridu.

Over the course of the work’s riproarious 10 minutes, whipcracks articulate many jolting gear changes and non sequiturs, whilst the front desks of violins and violas double on instruments whose scordaturas lend a blazing rawness to the open-string sonorities of the work’s arresting point of departure. A succession of dazzling orchestral textures – intricate and multilayered but always transparent – once again testify to the maturity of this young composer’s craft. Later, the glint of open strings returns to initiate a breathless coda which hurtles forward to its close.

Études in a new context As part of a residency at London’s Southwark Playhouse in February, the London Sinfonietta revived Coult’s Études Nos. 3 & 4 for solo violin as part of an evening of live music and film. Their principal violinist Jonathan Morton gave his third performance of the pieces, accompanied by a film made by students from Central Saint Martins College.

Interview One of his generation’s leading voices, Coult features in Encounters with British Composers, a compilation of interviews by Andrew Palmer recently published by Boydell & Brewer. His articulate musings on everything from the ideas behind his 2011 Piano Trio ‘The Chronophage’ to an early obsession with Stravinsky appear alongside interviews with composers including Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Oliver Knussen, as well as both Colin and David Matthews.

‘Sculthorpe’s matchless ability to evoke vast, parched landscapes is as strong as ever, and the more literal moments (like the swooping bird calls) never sound hackneyed.’ The Artsdesk (Graham Rickson), 6 February 2016

Nourlangie/From Kakadu 2.3.16, Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London, UK: Andrey Lebedev/Students from the Royal Academy of Music/Jo Cole

My Country Childhood 21-23.4.16, Filharmonisch Huis, Antwerp, Belgium: de Filharmonie/ Steven Verhaert (‘Song of the River’ only)

Sun Music I 10,12,13.8.16, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Sydney Symphony Orchestra/David Robertson

Irkanda I 15.11.16, Milton Court, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, UK: Richard Tognetti/Polina Leschenko

‘The first movement is sun-drenched and full of yearning, the saxophone soaring over a teeming orchestra; the second is a more unsettled expression of homesickness.’ The Guardian (Erica Jeal), 21 January 2016

A defining work The first part of Sculthorpe’s Sun Music series will be performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under the baton of David Robertson in August. The 10-minute work, commissioned for the 1965 Commonwealth Festival, marked a defining moment in Sculthorpe’s prolific career. Writing with the intention of re-evaluating rhythm, harmony and melody, Sculthorpe sought inspiration from the sun, representing its impressive qualities in an opulent soundscape that combines harsh brass sonorities with scintillating strings. Deemed by critic Neville Cardus as having laid ‘the foundations of an original and characteristic Australian music’ it lead Sculthorpe to develop a wholly new sonic vocabulary. It was one of the first works to catch the attention of Faber Music, and was later choreographed by Robert Helpmann for The Australian Ballet.

photos: tom coult © maurice foxall; peter sculthorpe © chris latham

Thomas Adès Selected forthcoming performances

Thomas Adès Meanwhile, Adès’s brilliant Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face, has been given a new lease of life in a version for two pianos, commissioned by Piano Spheres and premiered by Adès and Gloria Cheng in Los Angeles in September. The original 15-minute reworking of music from four scenes of opera requires extreme virtuosity, at the very edges of what is possible. As well as being more manageable for the performers, the new version has enabled Adès to reinstate some lost lines from the opera.

Tevot/Polaris/ Brahms 9.3.16, Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, London, UK: Samuel Dale Johnson/London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Powder Her Face 13.3-23.?4.16, Das Meininger Theater, Meiningen, Thüringen, Germany: dir. Lars Wernecke/ Philippe Bach/Meininger Hofkapelle 19.3-16.4.16, Takkelloftet, Operaen på Holmen, Copenhagen, Denmark: Royal Danish Opera/Robert Houssart Czech premiere 24.4-4.5.16, Theatre Reduta, Brno, Czech Republic: National Theatre Brno Spanish premiere 6.5.16, Teatro Arriaga Antzokia, Bilbao, Spain: Orquesta Sinfónica de Bizkaia/Ana Uriarte/Diego Martín Etxebarria

Chamber Symphony 13.3.16, LSO St Luke’s, London, UK: François Xavier Roth/London Symphony Orchestra

Asyla 16.3.16, Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, London, UK: London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès 20-22.5.16, Jacoby Symphony Hall, Jacksonville, FL, USA: Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra/Courtney Lewis

Lieux retrouvés orchestration World premiere 23-24.3.16, KKL Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland: Steven Isserlis/Lucerne Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Violin Concerto 26.3.16, New World Center, Miami Beach, FL, USA: Anthony Marwood/ New World Symphony/Stefan Asbury 8.4.16, Smith Auditorium, Williamette University, Salem; 9-11.4.16, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland, OR, USA: Augustin Hadelich/Oregon Symphony Orchestra/Carlos Kalmar 4.5.16, Music Centre, Helsinki. Finland: Augustin Hadelich/Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/SanttuMatias Rouvali 30.4.16, Muziekgebouw Frits Philips, Eindhoven; 1.5.16, Chassé Theater, Breda, The Netherlands: Thomas Gould/Philharmonie Zuidnederland/ Garry Walker

Three Studies from Couperin 14-15.4.16, Teatro Jovellanos, Gijon, Spain: Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias/Lorenzo Viotti

Totentanz/These Premises Are Alarmed Dutch premiere of Totentanz 14-15.4.16, Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Simon Keenlyside/Mezzo TBA/ Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/ Thomas Adès

The Exterminating Angel A highlight of the operatic year, Adès’s third opera, after Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador, premieres at the Salzburg Festival in July. Directed by Tom Cairns, who together with the composer has created a libretto by adapting the original screenplay, the opera has been commissioned by Salzburg in co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and The Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen. Adès has long been fascinated by Buñuel’s masterpiece and who better to tackle this subject than one famously described by Richard Taruskin as a ‘surrealist composer’. Featuring some fifteen protagonists, The Exterminating Angel is set to be a true ensemble opera. Alongside the likes of Anne Sofie von Otter, Sally Matthews and Sir Thomas Allen and Sir John Tomlinson, the opera also reunites Adès with singers associated with The Tempest, from Christine Rice who created the role of Miranda, and Iestyn Davies who sang Trinculo at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, to the extraordinary soprano Audrey Luna whose performances in the stratospheric role of Ariel have proved so memorable (who knows what vocal acrobatics Adès may have planned for her here?). This starry cast is joined by the Salzburger Bachchor and the ORF RadioSymphonieorchester Wien for four performances in Salzburg’s Haus für Mozart conducted by Adès himself.

‘Powder Her Face’ on stage and in concert Whilst anticipation surrounding Adès’s next project continues to grow, his hugely successful operatic debut Powder Her Face continues to travel the world, with recent performances in Brno, Copenhagen, Meiningen and Milwaukee. The 11-minute concert suite Dances from Powder Her Face is also well on the way to become a repertoire work, with 25 performances in the last two years. Two additional movements are planned for the Berlin Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle in 2017.

photo: Thomas Adès © Agnete Schlichtkrull

Adès took his model from Liszt’s idea of ‘reminiscences’ of operas. ‘It’s as if I was trying to remember parts of the opera after getting home, without a score,’ he comments. ‘There’s a lot to be said for this idea, as a way to find a new path. I think trying to remember things and getting them wrong is a very important way to progress, and endangered in the age of Google!’ ‘Adès has slightly paraphrased his original paraphrase. But the big difference is that it is now a drama. The pianos do not portray individual characters, but there are two interpreters, and intriguing psychological ambiguities inevitably ensue.’ LA Times (Mark Swed), 9 September 2015

Revisiting Lieux Retrouvés From the swirling waves of its opening movement ‘Les eaux’, the yodelling mountaineers of ‘La montagne’, the pastoral elegance of ‘Les champs’ with its hushed, stratospheric solo cello lines, and ‘La ville’ the romping ‘cancan macabre’ which bring it to a close, Adès’s Lieux Retrouvés traverses an astonishing range of emotional worlds. Adès has made a new version of the work for cello and chamber orchestra which he will premiere with Steven Isserlis and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra in March. The work will receive its UK premiere the following summer with the Britten Sinfonia, and is available for general performance from March 2017.

LSO Focus In March Adès will be the subject of a focus with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducting two concerts including Asyla, Tevot and Polaris, which will all be recorded on LSO Live. Another work featured is Brahms for baritone and orchestra (2001), a 6-minute setting of an Alfred Brendel poem in which the ghost of Brahms stalks a house and plays the piano late at night. Adès described this playful, but serious, piece as an ‘anti-homage’ and in it he seeks to take Brahms’s melodic and harmonic tics – such as sequences based on descending thirds, and densely contrapuntal textures – to ‘logical’ extremes. The tone of the work is never narrowly sarcastic, however. Instead, the limitations of the logic of Brahms’s material are used to great expressive effect, creating a compelling dramatic miniature in its own right, at once irreverent and profound.

TUNING IN

Nicholas Maw

John Woolrich

Thomas Adès Selected forthcoming performances (cont.) Polaris 16-17.4.16, Kosmos, Berlin, Germany: Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Gijs Leenaars 9-10.6.16, Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore; USA: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/ Marin Alsop

Scenes from The Tempest 23.4.16, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: London Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vladimir Jurowski

The Tempest Hungarian premiere

Revisiting ‘The World in the Evening’

Instruments of the Night

The World in the Evening (1988), Nicholas Maw’s first work for full orchestra after the completion of his magnum opus Odyssey, is a tone poem imbued with rich twilight hues and near-Mahlerian resignation. Unfolding over three continuous sections – two ‘Lullabies’ framing a ‘Fantasia’ – the 26-minute work inhabits a world poised between a foreboding, sepulchral sense of calm and frenetic, nightmarish visions. Maw’s is a fractured romanticism – changeable and angst-ridden though always retaining a sense of lyricism and wistful poetry. His craft is never more apparent than in the work’s spectacularly judged coda, which gradually fades away to the very limits of audibility – hushed string chords marked ‘pppppp’ followed by a diminuendo ‘al niente’.

From his 1993 Viola Concerto – really a cycle of seven bleak and brooding songs-without-words – to the drama and poetry of the Oboe Concerto (1996), where the fragile keening of the soloist is set against the brutal power of a large symphony orchestra, the concerto form has long been a central fascination for Woolrich. Another recurring trait is a preference for those instruments better attuned to the dusky half-light, like the inky rasp of the contrabassoon in his dark capriccio Falling Down (2009).

‘What is always notable is the music’s expansiveness, its sense of vast space encompassed. As in Odyssey, Maw articulates a genuinely original vision, distinguished by its warmth and beauty.’ The Observer (Nicholas Kenyon), 30 October 1988

In contrast to the vast Odyssey, The World in the Evening is scored for a relatively modest orchestra: only double woodwind, and a standard brass section without tuba. Premiered by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Bernard Haitink, the work evokes, in its composer’s words ‘a general feeling of twilight, in several different senses: a time of day, a time of life, a state of mind and a state of the world’. Filled with what Maw described as ‘a melancholy of melody’, the piece is the antithesis to his buoyant, airy and outward looking Spring Music from six years earlier. Still awaiting a commercial recording, this arresting, brooding work from an all-too-neglected master of the orchestra is ripe for rediscovery. Explore the music of Nicholas Maw further on the Faber Music Online Score Library: scorelibrary.fabermusic.com

Both these preoccupations are explored again in To the Silver Bow, a 15-minute double concerto for viola, double bass and strings which was premiered in February by The Academy of St Martin in the Fields with soloists Robert Smissen and Leon Bosch. Bosch, who commissioned the work, commented that ‘every ounce of the piece is Woolrich... essentially tonal but with a twist.’ ‘Violin and cello belong to the day, viola and double bass to the night’ says Woolrich, whose shadowy concerto takes its name from Hippolyta’s description of the moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like Woolrich’s Violin Concerto (2008), this work derives its drama from noncombative relationships; the soloists in this dark-hued nocturne are partners, sharing their material which is then in turn echoed by whispering strings.

21.5-1.6.16, Hungarian State Opera House, Budapest, Hungary: Soliosts/ Orchestra and Chorus of Hungarian State Opera/cond. Péter Halász/dir. Ludger Engels

The Exterminating Angel World premiere 28.7-8.8.16, Salzburg Festival, Haus für Mozart, Salzburg, Austria: Soloists/Salzburger Bachchor/ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien/ cond. Thomas Adès/dir. Tom Cairns

Dances from Powder Her Face/Violin Concerto 18.8.16, Salzburger Festspiele, Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg; 20.8.16, Grafenegg Festival, Wolkenturm, Grafenegg, Austria: Leila Josefowicz/The Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Most

John Woolrich Selected forthcoming performances Three Pieces for Viola 4.3.16, Salle Paul Dardier, Mirepoix, France: Louis Merlet

Darker Still 12.3.16, Budapest Music Center, Budapest, Hungary: Emily Beynon/ Andrew West

Swan Song

Ulysses Awakes

An 8-minute tribute to Jackie and Stephen Newbould, the departing heads of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Swan Song will be premiered in June as part of a concert entitled ‘Remembering the Future’. Alto flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello each have their own fragments of song and the piece is built from these broken melodies, punctuated by silence.

To the Silver Bow

An Artist-in-Association with BCMG since 2002, Woolrich has received numerous commissions from them including his masque for mime actors and ensemble Bitter Fruit (2001), and Lending Wings for 16 players (1989).

photos: nicholas maw © maurice foxall; john woolrich © maurice foxall

30.3.16, Collegiate Church of St Endelienta, St Endellion, UK: St Endellion Festival Orchestra/ Keith Slade 18, 24.3.16, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, UK: Students from TLCMD/ Leon Bosch

Swan Song World premiere 12.6.16, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Martin Suckling Selected forthcoming performances

Martin Suckling

French reaction to ‘La Fauvette’

Six Speechless Songs

A year since the publication of Peter Hill’s completion of Messiaen’s La Fauvette Passerinette, this significant but previously unknown piano work continues to make waves, including in the composer’s native France. Renowned Messiaen interpreter Roger Muraro performed the work live on French Radio last summer, and Hill’s sensational recording of the work came as a revelation to critics and was awarded the coveted Diapason d’Or.

22.4.16, City Halls, Glasgow; 23.4.16 Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK: Scottish Chamber Orchestra/ Oliver Knussen

Piano Concerto World premiere 12.10.16, Younger Hall, University of St Andrews, St Andrews; 13.10.16, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh; 14.10.16, City Halls, Glasgow, Scotland, UK: Tom Poster/Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati

Benjamin Britten Selected forthcoming performances Elegy for Solo Viola 4.3.16, Salle Paul Dardier, Mirepoix, Midi-Pyrénées, France: Louis Merlet

Paul Bunyan 10-13.3.16, MacMillan Theatre, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto

Welcome Ode 19.3.16, Malakoff Conservatoire, Paris, France: Malakoff Conservatoire

Owen Wingrave 3-14.4.16, Theater Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Niedersachsen, Germany: Stadtische Buhnen Osnabruck/dir. Floris Visser/Daniel Inbal 19-28.11.16, Amphithéâtre, Opéra Bastille, Opéra Nationale de Paris, Paris, France: Opéra National de Paris/cond. Stephen Higgins/dir. Tom Creed

Curlew River 26-29.4.16, Grand Théâtre de Dijon, Dijon, France: Opéra Dijon

Phaedra 6.5.16, Shanghai, China: Britten Sinfonia/Allison Cook (touring)

Owen Wingrave

(Chamber Reduction by David Matthews)

7-13.5.16, New Athenaeum Theatre, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, Scotland, UK: Students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland/cond. Timothy Dean/dir. Oliver Platt

Death In Venice 11.6.16, Theater Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany: Nadja Loschky/Pawel Poplawski

Nocturnal after John Dowland 18.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, St Bartholomew’s Church, Orford, Suffolk, UK: Sean Shibe

Olivier Messiaen

‘This discovery will be a shock to all. Partially restored, certainly, but a major work: a chiming eleven minutes which pass through continuums and gamelans before closing, after a dancing toccata, with a pirouette. Hill lives every note of this amazing codicil to the Catalogue d’oiseaux [Diapason d’Or].’

after Celan

Diapason (Paul Louit), April 2015

A powerful response to both the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of the artist and writer Edmund de Waal, Suckling’s Psalm – an unconducted work for harp and three spatialised ensembles – was unveiled by the Aurora Orchestra in November. The venue was London’s Royal Academy of Arts, where de Waal curated an exhibition focussed on the colour white. Throughout the 18-minute work, the harp acts as the lynchpin – generating most of the material, which is then picked up by the ensembles: white light refracted, scattered in a prism, echoed in a thousand different colours. The contemplative mood, echoing Celan’s poetry of entreaty and exhalation, is punctuated by ferocious outbursts and the work ends with the emergence of song – or the memory of song – on two violas who call from opposite sides of the hall.

‘The piano writing is tight and rigorous, with an orchestral richness, a continuation of the severe ‘Epode’ from Chronochromie.’ Télérama (Gilles Macassar), 19 November 2015

Benjamin Britten

‘Suckling’s absorbing Psalm... has an aura that lingers after the final bars… A composer with a vividly theatrical imagination.’ The Times (Neil Fisher), 12 November 2015

A pair of concertos Following de sol y grana, his dazzling 2011 concerto for violin and ensemble inspired by poetry of Machado, Suckling is now at work on two larger scale works for soloist and orchestra. A piano concerto for Tom Poster and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (his latest work as their Associate Composer) premieres in October conducted by Robin Ticciati, whilst in early 2017 a new Flute Concerto will be unveiled by Katherine Bryan and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Peter Oundjian. Bryan, who has already performed Suckling’s Three Venus Haiku for flute and piano, was appointed as the RSNO’s principal flute at the age of just 21 in 2003.

Recognition of exceptional promise Suckling, a Lecturer in the Music Department at the University of York, was recently awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhume Prize worth £100,000. The awards ‘recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising’. Photo: martin suckling © maurice foxall

Matthews on Britten In his 1964 Aspen Award lecture, Britten expressed a unique commitment to community and place. Beyond Britten, a new collection of essays edited by Peter Wiegold and Ghislaine Kenyon revisits this seminal text, inviting leading composers, producers and writers to consider the role of the British composer in the community over the last fifty years. Published by Boydell & Brewer, the book includes Britten’s lecture followed by an insightful response from Colin Matthews who, as someone who assisted him in the 1970s, is able to offer a fascinating perspective on the composer’s – at best – ambivalent relationship with modernism.

TUNING IN

Francisco Coll ‘The beginning of something...’ Inspired by the work of Spanish painter Hugo Fontela, whose cycles of interrelated paintings find a warmth within starkness and are often concerned with nature and decay, Coll’s Vestiges (2012) were premiered by Richard Uttley at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November and were subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 3. The pieces form a kind of triptych: the first and third movements are full of gnarly, volatile canons, while the second is a reflective chorale infected at its core by a germ of the energy of the outer movements. Coll works in the remnants of ideas from Bach and Nancarrow, stating that, ‘I don’t see the vestiges, the ruins, as the end of something, but as the beginning of something new, full of beauty and delicate power.’ Uttley also performed the 9-minute work at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris and will revive them again at the Swaledale Festival in June. ‘A concentrated, brief triptych… Coll adapts [Nancarrow’s] language of impossibly dynamic canons with originality and force.’ The Sunday Times (Paul Driver), 29 November 2015

‘Café Kafka’ in Valencia Following the success of its premiere in 2014, when the Sunday Times’s Paul Driver praised its ‘astonishing compositional assurance’, Coll’s 45-minute chamber opera Café Kafka will run for four performances at the Palau de Les Arts, Valencia in May. Inspired by the darkly surreal imagination of Franz Kafka, Coll’s first opera is an explosive gem. Taking its cue from Meredith Oakes’s punchy, cleverly-assembled libretto, the dazzling score brings out every nuance of the bizarre scenario’s comedy, irony and profundity. A portrait concert of Coll’s instrumental music is being planned to coincide with these performances.

A concerto for Mahan Esfahani Having premiered the Four Iberian Miniatures with Pekka Kuusisto and Thomas Adès in 2015, Britten Sinfonia was prompted to commission Coll to write a harpsichord concerto for Mahan Esfahani. This has all the ingredients of a memorable collaboration – no one has done more to enhance the image of the instrument in recent years than Esfahani, and Coll has long been fascinated with it (it plays an important role in his Piano Concertino, for instance). The 12-minute work for harpsichord and ensemble will be premiered in February 2017 in a programme which includes the de Falla concerto. Other upcoming projects include a work for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Speaking about the commission Stephen Newbould said: ‘Coll is a rare talent…There is a level of sophistication and refinement in his work and each new premiere is an exciting event. I saw Adès conduct the Four Iberian Miniatures for violin and chamber orchestra – a brilliantly imagined and entirely contemporary homage to flamenco which feels immediately like a repertoire piece. The idea for a vocal work to his own text, perhaps with some kind of theatre element, is enticing’.

photo: francisco coll © judith Lötscher

Orchestral virtuosity As with Vestiges, canonic thinking also underpins Coll’s exhilarating concert-opener Hidd’n Blue, which received two performances in February by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under Gustavo Gimeno. They are the sixth orchestra to perform this 5-minute work since its premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth back in 2009. Colourful, rhythmically charged and filled with startling harmonies, it builds to a truly vertiginous climax. Coll describes ‘a bass note of deep, mysterious blue that has been overlaid with swirling, lighter colours’. Quickly becoming one of Coll’s strongest advocates, Gimeno will also premiere Mural, a new 25-minute work for large orchestra in the opening concert of the Luxembourg Philharmonic’s 16/17 season. The catalyst for the piece was hearing Claudio Abbado conducting Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony in Lucerne back in 2013. ‘This provided the shock that I need always to start a work,’ says Coll. ‘Right after, I hurried home and wrote the harmonies which begin the piece. Usually I never start a piece from the beginning, however the first bars of Mural are the bars that I wrote that day.’ Composition of the mammoth work (co-commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain) took a further two years and it will be fascinating to hear Coll’s electrifying musical personality unleashed on such a vast orchestral canvas.

Conversing with Wagner With its rich, autumnal timbral palette, Coll’s transcription of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder for mezzosoprano and ensemble displays remarkable artistry and all the precision and delicacy of a watercolourist. Intricately dovetailed string textures are deftly weaved out of the original accompaniment whilst contrabassoon, alto flute, and muted brass lend the songs stranger hues that subtly evince Coll’s own voice. Premiered by Christiane Iven and the Ensemble intercontemporain conducted by Matthias Pintscher at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in October, this characterful 20-minute orchestration is available for performance from late 2016.

Francisco Coll Selected forthcoming performances Cuando el niño era niño... UK Premiere 22.4.16, PLG Young Artists Spring Series, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Lipatti Piano Quartet

Café Kafka Spanish Premiere 22-31.5.16, Teatre Martín i Soler, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia, Spain: Singers from the Centre Plácido Domingo/ Christopher Franklin (cond.)/ Alexander Herold (dir.)

Liquid Symmetries UK Premiere 1.6.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: London Sinfonietta/ Martyn Brabbins

Vestiges Italian Premiere 1.4.16, Accademia Filarmonica Romana, Rome, Italy: Alessandro Viale 5.6.16, Swaledale Festival, St Oswald’s Church, Askrigg, North Yorkshire, UK: Richard Uttley

Harpsichord Concerto World Premiere 3.2.17, Milton Court, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London; 4.2.17, Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, Essex, UK: Mahan Esfahani/ Britten Sinfonia

George Benjamin Selected forthcoming performances

George Benjamin Revisiting ‘Sometime Voices’

Ringed by the Flat Horizon

This year’s activity around the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare provides a perfect opportunity to revisit Benjamin’s Sometime Voices, a setting of Caliban’s famous speech in Act III Scene 2 of The Tempest for baritone, chorus and orchestra. Composed in 1996, the 9-minute work places long, forceful baritone lines above an orchestra that drifts between an eerie tranquillity and mercurial activity. Behind this, the chorus, acting as spirits – sometimes benign, sometimes menacing – invoke his name.

2.3.16, Konzerthaus, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany: SWR Orchestra/ George Benjamin 26.6.16, Grosse Saal, Laeiszhalle, Hamburg, Germany: Hamburger Symphoniker/Jeffrey Tate

Viola, Viola 7.3.16, National Sawdust, New York City, NY, USA: Players from the New York Philharmonic 9.5.16, Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie, Berlin, Germany: Ensemble Spectrum 25.9.16, Powell Hall, St Louis, MO, USA: Members of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra

Fantasia 7/Flight/ Viola, Viola/Canon & Fugue (from The Art of Fugue) 10.3.16, Dortmund, NordrheinWestfalen, Germany; 19.3.16, Barbican Theatre, Barbican Centre London, UK: Musicians from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Into the Little Hill/ Canon & Fugue (from The Art of Fugue) 11.3.16, Konzerthaus, Dortmund, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany: Anu Komsi/Hilary Summers/Mahler Chamber Orchestra/George Benjamin

Written on Skin 12.3.16, Konzerthaus, Dortmund; 13.3.16, Cologne Philharmonie, Cologne, Germany; 16.3.16, Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona; 17.3.16, Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain; 19.3.16, Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, London, UK: Christopher Purves/ Barbara Hannigan/Tim Mead/Robert Murray/Victoria Simmonds/Mahler Chamber Orchestra/George Benjamin

Canonic Codes

Written on Skin Recently described as ‘one of the first masterpieces of the 21st century’ by Anthony Tommasini in a survey of the Best Classical Music of 2015 by The New York Times, Benjamin’s ground-breaking opera has taken the world by storm since its premiere in 2012. Its composer harnesses an array of diverse instruments – including glass harmonica, bass viol and steel drums – in a strikingly beautiful and rich score which responds to every nuance of Martin Crimp’s resonant, finely chiselled text. London’s Royal Opera House will revive the work in 2017. The opera’s economical means – a cast of five and an orchestra of 60 players – make it an ideal work for touring in concert performance. This March the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, who gave the work’s premiere in Aix, will present it in Dortmund, Cologne, Madrid and Barcelona, before closing ‘Benjamin at the Barbican’ – two days of concerts devoted to the composer at London’s Barbican Centre which also include the UK premiere of his latest creation Dream of the Song.

A new recording of Benjamin’s Shadowlines (the fifth on CD and DVD to date) from Gilles Vonsattel has been released on the Honens label, where it appears alongside Webern’s Variations Op. 27. This pairing is apt, as it was a fascination with Webern’s work – encounters with the Symphony Op. 21 and the Op. 16 canons in particular – that proved to be the catalyst for Benjamin’s own captivating foray into strict canonic procedure. Composed in 2001 for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Shadowlines was Benjamin’s first piano work in almost two decades. By turns gentle and explosive, intimate and monolithic, its six movements (all canons in different ways) form a continuous 15-minute structure of great drama. More often than not, Benjamin’s processes are hidden, and go beyond standard techniques of transposition and inversion; from ‘elastic’ canons, where lines expand, contract or fuse according to variable speeds, to a procedure of Benjamin’s own invention where melodic lines and chords pass through a simple intervallic code and emerge totally transformed. A bitter sequence of octatonic chords becomes a blues-like sequence of dominant 7ths, whilst a fierce, plangently chromatic two-part polyphony is transfigured into mild, pentatonic yodelling.

Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm/Relativity Rag/Shadowlines/ Piano Figures 16.3.16, Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain: Tamara Stefanovich

Dance Figures 17.3.16, Suntory Hall, Tokyo, Japan: Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra/Lothar Zagrosek

Dream of the Song UK premiere 18.3.16, Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, London, UK: Iestyn Davies/ BBC Singers/BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen US premiere 25.7.16, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, MA, USA: Daniel Moody/ Lorelei Ensemble/ Tanglewood Festival Orchestra/ Stefan Asbury

photo: george benjamin © renske Vrolijk score excerpt: shadowlines I © faber music

TUNING IN

Julian Anderson Aldeburgh Festival Focus Anderson is a featured composer at the 2016 Aldeburgh Festival. The Arditti Quartet perform his String Quartet No. 2, The Choir of King’s College Cambridge present the Bell Mass in both the Festival service and in concert, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group revive The Comedy of Change under Ilan Volkov. Also featured are the Violin Concerto (with Carolin Widmann and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ryan Wigglesworth), the early violin duo Ring Dance, and a new set of piano pieces for the Festival’s Artistic Director Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Anderson will also give the Hesse Lecture, examining the widespread prejudice against modern composition and offering some solutions for the future.

Triumph at the British Composer Awards Anderson was the recipient of two 2015 British Composer Awards. His Second String Quartet ‘300 Weihnachtslieder’ won the small chamber category whilst his captivating first opera, Thebans, was awarded the Stage Works prize. The BASCA judging panel described the Quartet as ‘an important and intricate piece’ whilst Radio 3’s Sara Mohr-Pietsch dubbed Thebans ‘an astonishingly bold and gripping work’. Anderson has now been awarded a total of 6 BASCAs over his illustrious career.

Shir Hashirim A former pupil of Henri Dutilleux’s at Tanglewood, Anderson wrote his Shir Hashirim for soprano and orchestra for the composer’s 85th birthday in 2001. In January this sumptuous, 10-minute setting of Hebrew words from The Song of Songs was revived as part of a concert celebrating Dutilleux’s centenary by Elizabeth Atherton and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Pascal Rophé. ‘Its balancing of the solo soprano’s expansively lyrical outpouring with the brilliant orchestral writing was always finely judged and the dramatic tension of the final part of the work delivered with much flair by Elizabeth Atherton.’

George Benjamin Selected forthcoming performances (cont.) Dream of the Song French premiere 28-29.9.16, Festival d’Automne, Philharmonie, Paris: Bejun Mehta/ SWR Vokalensemble Orchestre de Paris/Daniel Harding NY premiere 2.3.17, Carnegie Hall, New York City, NY, USA: Bejun Mehta/Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons

Shadowlines 19.3.16, Barbican Theatre, Barbican Centre, London, UK: George King 8.7.16, Chamber Music Northwest, Portland, OR, USA: Gilles Vonsattel

‘Eden’ in Amsterdam and Mainz

At First Light

Anderson’s Eden received two vivid performances this September from George Benjamin and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, who clearly relished its exotic, expressive harmonies and its infectiously joyous hockets. The 7-minute work receives its German premiere in March with the Philharmonischen Staatsorchester Mainz conducted by Hermann Bäumer.

Two or Four

‘A tingling soundscape out of microtones, making the whole orchestra sound like a vast steel drum. The colouration of simple intervals gives a surreal sheen, and Anderson carefully weaves them into a great clangorous chiming.’ de Volkskrant (Frits van de Waa), 28 September 2015

LPO residency recorded A new release from the London Philharmonic, the second to document Anderson’s time as their Composer in Residence, features recordings of Alleluia and The Stations of the Sun alongside his recent Violin Concerto featuring Carolin Widmann as soloist. Written to celebrate the opening of the Royal Festival Hall, Alleluia is described by Anderson as a 15-minute ‘concerto for chorus’. The recording of The Stations of the Sun (the second to appear on disc) was made during Southbank Centre’s ‘The Rest Is Noise’ festival in 2013.

The Guardian (Rian Evans), 29 January 2016

‘Exquisite… Anderson creates a sumptuous backcloth to his vocal line, with its ecstatic melismas and arabesques, yet only lets the orchestra loose when the voice is silent… [A] model composition.’ The Arts Desk (Stephen Walsh), 29 January 2016

Julian Anderson celebrates his 50th birthday in 2017. If you are interested in marking this occasion and would like to find out more please contact promotion@fabermusic.com

14.4.16, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Asko|Schönberg Ensemble/Etienne Siebens

UK premiere 24.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Britten Studio, Snape, Suffolk, UK: PierreLaurent Aimard

Upon Silence 24.6.16, Kings Place, London, UK: Susan Bickley/Fretwork

Julian Anderson Selected forthcoming performances The Comedy of Change, 6.4.16, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Sydney Conservatorium of Musc/Daryl Pratt. 11.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Britten Studio, Snape, Suffolk, UK: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Ilan Volkov

Eden German premiere 6.3.16, Mainz, Germany: Philharmonischen Staatsorchester Mainz/Hermann Bäumer

Alhambra Fantasy 9.4.16, Kilbourn Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA: University of Rochester

Bell Mass 19.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Holy Trinity Church, Blythburgh, Suffolk, UK: Choir of Kings College, Cambridge/Stephen Cleobury (also performed earlier in the day at the Festival service in Aldeburgh Parish Church)

String Quartet No.2 25.6.16, Aldeburgh Festival, Britten Studio, Snape, Suffolk, UK: Arditti Quartet

image: julian anderson ©maurice foxall faber music LPO Anderson disc

David Matthews Selected forthcoming performances One Foot in Eden 9.3.16, deSingel, Antwerp, Belgium: James Gilchrist/DoelenKwartet/ Anna Tilbrook

Sonatina 12.4.16, Firth Hall, University of Sheffield, Sheffield; 9.6.16, St George’s, Bristol, UK: Krysia Osostowicz/Daniel Tong

Norfolk March World premiere 27.5.16, English Music Festival, Dorchester Abbey, Dorchesteron-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK: BBC Concert Orchestra/Martin Yates

Eight Duos 30.4.16, Madrid, Spain: Retorica Duo

Piano Trio No. 2 6.10.16, William Alwyn Festival, Holy Trinity Church, Blythburgh, Suffolk, UK: Odysseus Piano Trio

Arrangements String Quartet (Elgar arr. Matthews)

6.3.16, St Stephen’s Church, Newtown, NSW, Australia: Bourbaki Ensemble/David Angell

David Matthews Bamberg Encore Taking its name from the well-known poem by Goethe, David Matthews’s Nachtgesang was commissioned by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra as part of their ongoing project to create a body of contemporary encores, and was unveiled in February with three performances conducted by Jérémie Rhorer. The evocative 5-minute work draws on many aspects of German Romanticism, with horn calls and sounds of nature, including the songs of two night birds, the Nightingale and Tawny Owl. Birdsong is a common feature of Matthews’s work, though here Matthews has drawn on the Tawny Owl call from Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path – a work which he has orchestrated – stating ‘he has notated the call so precisely, I could do nothing better’. The musical structure mirrors that of the poem – five stanzas, each ending with the line ‘Schlafe! Was willst du mehr?’ (‘Sleep, what more do you desire?’). Musically this refrain becomes fuller with each repetition, beginning with a series of quiet string chords, adding a number of string solos before concluding with a surprise: in the work’s final bars players from the orchestra sing the poem’s last line. This is not the first time Matthews has engaged with this giant of German Romanticism – he has previously set Goethe in his Lebensregeln for high voice and piano (2011). Except for the love poem ‘Nähe des Geliebten’, all the poems in this 11-minute collection originate from the second half of Goethe’s life and are epigrammatic philosophical statements dispensing the mature poet’s wisdom about life.

Norfolk March Matthews has a long association with the music of Vaughan Williams, both as an editor of his music and as a fellow member of the English symphonic tradition. Matthews’s Sixth Symphony (2007) is permeated by Vaughan Williams’s hymn tune ‘Down Ampney’ whilst in 2010 Dark Pastoral, based on surviving fragments of the slow movement of a proposed Cello Concerto, was premiered by Steven Isserlis and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the BBC Proms. In a new project that goes even beyond ‘completion’, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society have commissioned Matthews to compose a work based on the programme note of the lost Norfolk Rhapsody No.3 (written in 1906). Matthews has brought together four folk songs alluded to in the programme note to create a 10-minute work which will receive its first performance at the English Music Festival at Dorchester Abbey on 27 April, with the BBC Concert Orchestra under Martin Yates. However, in the centenary of the worst year of the First World War, thoughts of what might have happened to those soldiers in 1916 caused Matthews to make a drastic change from what Vaughan Williams would have done:

‘Though I do not stray far from the programme note,’ says Matthews, ‘the piece becomes suddenly dark and sinister, and the fortissimo and largamente statement of ‘‘Ward the Pirate’’ is a grim funeral march. My coda begins with a wistful recollection of ‘‘The Lincolnshire Farmer’’ on solo violin, but ending with a kind of ‘‘last post’’ on the trumpets, deliberately recalling Vaughan Williams’s trumpet solo in his Pastoral Symphony, his own First World War statement.’ Further

Praise for Eighth Symphony

Premiered by the BBC Philharmonic and HK Gruber in April 2015, Matthews’s latest symphony was received to critical acclaim, a position reinforced when the work was chosen as one of the premieres of 2015 by Classical Music Magazine: ‘Premiere of the year, no doubt about it… [It] went a long way to restoring my faith in today’s music… If you want a new symphonic work that will really go down well with an audience, this is the one.’ Classical Music Magazine (Robert Beale), December 2015

In the studio In February, the Leonore Trio recorded an all-Matthews disc for Toccata Classics which features all three of his piano trios alongside his Journeying Songs performed by their cellist Gemma Rosefield. The fourth volume of Toccata’s ongoing survey of Matthews’s string quartets with the Kreutzer Quartet was released in January. The disc will include a performance of the String Quartet No. 11 alongside Matthews’s Beethoven transcriptions. Meanwhile, violinist Rupert Marshall-Luck and the BBC Concert Orchestra under Gavin Sutherland recorded White Nights for release later this year on EM Records. A recording of the Piano Quintet by Martin Cousin and the Villiers Quartet will soon be released by SOMM Recordings, and Rohan de Saram’s account of Songs and Dances of Mourning (1976) features on First Hand Records.

photo: the complete string quartets vol. 4 on toccata classics (original photo of david matthews © sophia scott)

TUNING IN

Malcolm Arnold

Torsten Rasch

Malcolm Arnold Selected forthcoming performances Concerto for Clarinet No. 2 5.3.16, Kirche Delmenhorst, Delmenhorst; 6.3.16, Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Niedersachsen Germany: Gemeinschaftsorchester/ Genci Puka 23.4.16, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi, Charleroi, Belgium: Pierre Xhonneux/Candide Symphonic Orchestra/Patrick Leterme

Four Cornish Dances 5.3.16, Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas, VA, USA: Manassas Symphony Orchestra/ James Villani

Arnold Archive deposited at Eton

Violin Concerto

A substantial collection of Arnold’s manuscripts have been deposited at Eton College Library on loan, and is now available to scholars for research. The archive, which brings material previously loaned by the Royal College of Music together with privately held manuscripts hitherto unavailable to the public, has been catalogued on the Eton College Collections online database: collections.etoncollege.com

In April 2016, Rasch’s Violin Concerto ‘Tropoi’ premieres in Dresden, with Wolfgang Hentrich and the Dresden Philharmonic under Leo McFall. The US premiere, with Philippe Quint and the Spokane Symphony conducted by Eckart Preu follows in September. Rasch’s first foray into the concerto form, this substantial 28-minute work, promises to be a fascinating next step for this most searching and individual of composers.

The Complete Music for Brass When the National Youth Brass Band of Scotland commissioned and then performed Arnold’s Little Suite for Brass No. 1 in 1963, John Wallace and John Miller, now members of the Wallace Collection brass ensemble, were introduced to the enduring power of the music and Arnold himself. Now, more than fifty years after that first immersion, the Wallace Collection is masterminding a complete recording of the composer’s music for brass instruments to coincide with the tenth anniversary of his death in 2016. The National Youth Brass Band of Scotland conducted by Richard Evans and Russell Gray continue that great institution’s connection with Arnold by recording all of his music for brass band together with a selection of transcriptions. Musicians from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland add performances of Arnold’s delightful occasional fanfares whilst four young soloists at the outset of their careers, chosen through a competition initiated by The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Malcolm Arnold Trust, perform the four fantasies for horn, trumpet, trombone and tuba. The CD will be recorded during 2016 and will be launched through the Wallace Collection/Nimbus Alliance label at the Malcolm Arnold Festival in Northampton in October. In other recording news, Sony Classical is reissuing the complete Conifer Recordings, an invaluable compendium of much of Arnold’s work. The 11-disc box set will be released in mid-April.

photo: TORSTEN RASCH © MAURICE FOXALL

A Welsh Night Rasch has become something of a favourite at The Three Choirs Festival, with three commissions in as many years. A Welsh Night, his 14-minute song cycle setting poems by the World War II poet Alun Lewis, was unveiled in Gloucester by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton in July. A London premiere is scheduled for 2017, and Rasch is also at work on an orchestration for the next Three Choirs Festival. ‘The outstanding 2015 commission... The poetry (“Fine flame of silver birches flickers...”, “Black dog barking at the moon”) was endlessly absorbing. You could see why Rasch was drawn to it. The subtle independent piano part played a major part in these gripping new songs’ success.’

Concerto for Two Violins and String Orchestra 14.5.16, St James’s Church, Piccadilly, London, UK: Peter Fisher/ Maya Iwabuchi/Chamber Ensemble of London

Torsten Rasch Selected forthcoming performances Violin Concerto World premiere 17.4.16, Kreuzkirche, Dresden, Germany: Dresden Philharmonic/ Leo McFall

Zeit und Ewigkeit World premiere 17.6.16, Unerhörtes Mitteldeutschland, Hallescher Dom, Halle an der Saale, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany: Stadtsingechor zu Halle/ Clemens Flämig

Bachtrack (Roderick Dunnett), 7 August 2015

Two Love Songs A new setting of poems by the East German dissident writer Thomas Brasch – whose work previously inspired Rasch’s first opera, Rotter – premiered in Kaiserslautern in September. The 10-minute Zwei Liebeslieder nach Thomas Brasch for baritone and orchestra once again showcase Rasch’s masterful understanding of both vocal and orchestral writing.

Zeit und Ewigkeit A 5-minute a cappella choral setting of words by 17thcentury mystic Angelus Silesius, ruminating on time and eternity, will be premiered by the Stadtsingechor zu Halle and Clemens Flämig in June.

NEW WORKS Stage Works

Chamber

CARL DAVIS

MATTHEW HINDSON

Nijinsky (2015) ballet. 170 minutes. Text: Daniel de Andrade inspired by the concept and research by Christopher Gable FP: 27.11.15, Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava, Slovakia: Orchestra of the Slovak National Theatre/cond. Carl Davis/chor. Daniel de Andrade. Score and parts for hire

String Quartet No. 4 (2016) string quartet and percussion. 20 minutes. perc(1): vib/crot – 2 vln.vla.vlc. Commissioned by the Australian String Quartet for premiere performance with Claire Edwardes, and dedicated to my new daughter, Miss Mabel Melrose Hindson. FP: 29.2.16, Adelaide Festival, Adelaide Town Hall (Adelaide, SA, Australia): Claire Edwardes/Australian String Quartet Score and Parts in preparation

Orchestra

PETER SCULTHORPE

TOM COULT Sonnet Machine (2015) orchestra. 10 minutes. 3(III=picc).0.3(II=Ebcl.III=bcl).2.cbsn – 4.3.2.btrbn.1 – perc(4): I: medium susp.cym/whip/mar II: large susp.cym/tabla/bongos/tamb/whip III: small susp.cym/BD/glsp IV: sleigh bells/ whip/vib – harp – strings (14.12.10.8.6). Commissioned by the BBC FP: 23.4.16, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Gourlay. Score and parts for hire

MATTHEW HINDSON Technologic 145 (1998/arr.2015) chamber orchestra. 13 minutes. 1(=picc+claves).1(=guiro).1(=chicken shaker).1(=cbsn) – 1(=vibraslap).1.1.0 – harp – strings. This version was made for the Tasmanian SO and Benjamin Northey, who recorded the work for ABC Classics in February 2016. Full score and parts for hire

DAVID MATTHEWS Nachtgesang (2015) encore for orchestra. 5 minutes. 2(II=picc).2(II=ca).2.2 – 2.2.0.0 – timp – strings (minimum 5.4.4.4.2). Commissioned by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. FP: 18.2.16, Heinrich-Lades-Halle, Erlangen, Germany: Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/Jérémie Rhorer. Score and parts for hire Norfolk March (2016) orchestra. 10 minutes 2(II=picc).2(II=ca).2.2 – 4.2.3.1 – timp – perc(2): tgl/2 susp.cym (medium, large)/tam-t/SD/BD – harp – strings. Commissioned by the RVW Society with support from the RVW Trust and the John S Cohen Foundation. FP: 27.5.16, Dorchester Abbey, Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK: BBC Concert Orchestra/Martin Yates. Score and parts for hire

TORSTEN RASCH Violin Concerto ‘Tropoi’ (2015) concerto for violin and orchestra. c.28 minutes. picc.2(II=picc+afl).2.ca.2(II=bcl).bcl(=cbcl).2.cbsn – 4.3.3.1 – timp – perc(3): I. BD/2 gongs/medium tam-t/mar/vib (shared with player 2) II. 3 tam-t (small, medium, large)/clashed cym (piatti)/t.bells/vib/glsp (shared with player 3) III. 2 tam-t (medium, large)/Chinese cym/2 susp.cym (small, large)/tgl/crot/ 4 tpl.bl/glsp harp – cel – strings (14.12.10.8.6). Commissioned by the Dresdner Philharmonie, Spokane Symphony and South Carolina Philharmonic FP: 17.4.16, Kreuzkirche, Dresden, Sachsen, Germany: Wolfgang Hentrich/Dresdner Philharmonie/ Leo McFall. Score and parts for hire

JOHN WOOLRICH To the Silver Bow (2014) double concerto for viola, double bass and strings. 15 minutes. vla.db.strings. Commissioned by Leon Bosch with kind support from Arts Council England. FP: 16.2.16, St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, UK: Robert Sissen/Leon Bosch/Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Score and parts for hire

Ensemble TANSY DAVIES Feather and Groove (2008 rev. 2015) mixed ensemble of mixed ability, for 6 to 20 players, with semi-open scoring. 5½ minutes. solo vln – High (suggested: fl.cl) Middle (suggested: 4 hn) Bass 1 (suggested: bcl.vlc) trbn Bass 2 (suggested: cbsn.db) drum kit.electric gtr.electric keyboard. Commissioned by CoMA with funds from the Performing Rights Society Foundation, the Arts Council of England London and subscribers to CoMA’s Commissioning Scheme. FP: 30.10.08, The Warehouse, Waterloo, London, UK: CoMA. Score and parts for hire

ANDERS HILLBORG Scream Sing Whisper (2015) ensemble of 18 players. c.23 minutes. 1(=picc).1.2(II=bcl).1(=cbsn) – 2.1.1.0 – perc(2): vib/mar/glsp/crot/t.bells/log drum/kick drum/tam-t – pno – harp – strings (1.1.1.1.1). Commissioned by Asko|Schönberg, Swedish Radio, Christian Karlsen and Föreningen Kammarmusik NU with kind support from the Swedish Arts Council. FP: 19.11.15, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands: Asko|Schönberg/Christian Karlsen. Score and parts for hire

PETER SCULTHORPE An Australian Anthem (2006) brass octet arranged by James Ledger. Duration 4 minutes. 3 tpt.2 hn.2 trbn.tuba. Score and parts for hire

MARTIN SUCKLING Psalm (2015) harp and 3 groups of 4 players. 18 minutes. FP: 9.11.15, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK: Aurora Orchestra. Commissioned by Edmund de Waal for performances at the Royal Academy and Kings Place on the occasion of On White, November 2015. 2 fl.2 cl(I=bcl).harp.2 vln.2 vla.2 vlc.2 db. Score and parts for hire

Island Songs (2013) two pianos and didjeridu. c.18½ minutes. FP: 11.12.14, Australian Embassy, Paris, France: Brown and Breen Piano Duo/ Russell Smith. Commissioned by Bonnie Brown and Louisa Breen. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, it’s arts funding and advisory body. Score on special sale Night Song (2004) violin, horn and piano. 6 minutes. Score and parts on special sale from the Hire Library

JOHN WOOLRICH Swan Song (2015) chamber ensemble of 5 players. c.8 minutes. afl.cl.vln.vla.vc. FP: 12.6.16, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with financial assistance from Arts Council England and the following individuals through BCMG’s Sound Investment scheme: Kiaran Asthana, Alan S Carr, Christopher Carrier, Simon Collings, Kathleen England, Janet London, Maureen and William Scott and Michael B Squires. Score and parts in preparation

Instrumental ANDERS HILLBORG Close Ups (Närbilder) (1991) flute solo. 7 minutes. Score on special sale from the Hire Library U-Tangia-Na (1991) alto-trombone and organ or tape. 5 minutes. Commissioned by The Swedish Radio for Christian Lindberg. Score on special sale from the Hire Library. A link to the electronic resources necessary for public performance will be Supplied by the Hire Library upon request

PETER SCULTHORPE Djilile (2008) arranged for two guitars by Janet Agostino. 6 minutes. Score on special sale from the Hire Library

CLOSE UPS NÄRBILDER

SOLO FLUTE

Anders Hillborg 1991

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NEW PUBLICATIONS AND RECORDINGS Vocal

New Publications

New Recordings

GEORGE BENJAMIN

THOMAS ADÈS

GEORGE BENJAMIN

Dream of the Song (2014) countertenor, female chorus and orchestra. 20 minutes. Text by Ibn Gabirol (trans. Peter Cole), Samuel HaNagrid (trans. Peter Cole) and Federico Garcia Lorca (English/Spanish) Singers: Countertenor and small female chorus. 2 ob – 4 hn – perc(2): glsp/2 vib/2 gongs/2 cyms – 2 harps – strings (12.12.10.8.6). FP: 25.9.15, Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Bejun Mehta/ Netherlands Chamber Choir/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/George Benjamin. Commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and Festival d’Automne à Paris. Score and parts for hire

Powder Her Face

TANSY DAVIES The Second Key (2011 rev. 2016) mezzo-soprano or countertenor and mixed ensemble of 10 or more players of mixed ability. 8½ minutes. Text by Guilhelm IX d’Aquitane translated by Mariette Purcell (Eng). gtr with steel strings – Upper 1 (suggested: fl.cl.vln) Upper 2 (suggested: tpt.hn) Lower 1 (suggested: bcl.vla.vlc) Lower 2 (suggested: trbn) – pno. Commissioned by CoMA. FP: rev. version: 6.3.16, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK: BCMG/CoMA/Michael Finnissy. Full score, vocal score and parts for hire Song of Pure Nothingness (2012-13) voice and keyboard instrument. 13 minutes. Text by Guilhelm IX d’Aquitane translated by Mariette Purcell (Eng). FP: 9.9.13, Ultima Festival, Oslo, Norway: Elisabeth Holmertz/Kenneth Karlsson. Score on special sale from the Hire Library Song of Pure Nothingness (2015) mezzo-soprano or countertenor and piano. 13 minutes. Text by Guilhelm IX d’Aquitane translated by Mariette Purcell (Eng). FP: 17.2.16, Byre Theatre, St Andrews, Scotland, UK: Andrew Watts/Huw Watkins. For Andrew Watts. Score on special sale from the Hire Library

CARL VINE The Slope (2015) low voice and string quartet. 6 minutes. Text ‘The Slope’ by Judith Wright (Eng). FP: 28.4.16, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, QLD, Australia: Katie Noonan/Brodsky String Quartet. Commissioned by Katie Noonan. Score and parts in preparation

Choral MATTHEW MARTIN Behold, now praise the Lord (2015) mixed voices. 4 minutes

THORKELL SIGURBJORNSSON Heyr, Himna Smidur (1973) unaccompanied SATB chorus (or SSA, SSAA, or TTBB). 3 minutes. Text: Kolbeinn Tumason (12th century Icelandic) Scores of all 4 versions available from Choralstore.com

Full Score 0-571-51995-4

£100.00

JULIAN ANDERSON

britten/Colin Matthews

Fantasias

Full Score 0-571-53884-3

£24.99

Benjamin Britten Death in Venice

Full Score (amended edition) 0-571-53939-4

£59.99

Tansy Davies Nature

Full Score 0-571-53932-7

£24.99

Colin Matthews Turning Point

Full Score 0-571-53944-0

Shadowlines Gilles Vonsattel Honens 201501CD

£24.99

Movements for a Clarinet Concerto Michael Collins/BBC Symphony Orchestra Chandos CHAN 10891

COUPERIN/THOMAS ADÈS Les barricades mistérieuses Aurora Orchestra/Nicholas Collon Warner Classics 0825646082230

TANSY DAVIES Feather and Groove London Sinfonietta/Gregory Rose NMC DL228

JONATHAN HARVEY Sringara Chaconne Musikfabrik/Peter Rundel Wergo WER 68622

MATTHEW HINDSON Pulse Magnet (premiere recording) Pascal & Ami Rogé (pianos)/Paul Clarvis/Joby Burgess (percussion) Onyx Classics ONYX 4128 Love Serenade Ben Hoadley/Dean Sky-Lucas Atoll #acd579

GUSTAV HOLST Invocation Steven Isserlis/Philharmonia Orchestra/Paavo Järvi Hyperion CDA68077

PETER SCULTHORPE Island Songs Amy Dickson/Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Benjamin Northey ABC Classics 481 1703

GORDON THORNETT Festive Overture: The Joy of Christmas RTÉ Concert Orchestra/Gavin Sutherland Heritage Records HTGCD 299

Garbo, Gish and Bow: The Leading Ladies of Faber Silents

From Lillian Gish’s screen debut, An Unseen Enemy, and Greta Garbo’s extraordinary Flesh and the Devil, to Clara Bow’s star-maker, It, the rich and diverse Faber Silents catalogue features three of the most prominent female stars of the era in shorts and features with expertly crafted scores by the matchless Carl Davis.

Greta Garbo Flesh and the Devil (1926)

110 minutes

Set in Prussia, this melodrama of love, adultery, duels and retribution was the first of five films in which Garbo co-starred with her real-life lover John Gilbert. Davis’s rich score is imbued with echoes of 19thcentury German Romanticism and its glorious Love Theme is one of his finest creations. The Mysterious Lady (1928)

84 minutes

In one of her most transfixing performances, Garbo plays the femme fatale in this spy romance, set in Vienna just before World War I. The central characters meet at the opera during a performance of Puccini’s Tosca and Davis uses the aria ‘Vissi d’arte’ as a principal element of the score, alluding to a variety of Russian, Polish and German musics along the way. A Woman of Affairs (1928)

80 minutes

A Woman of Affairs features Garbo and Gilbert in one of their most sizzling partnerships playing forbidden lovers. Davis’s score orbits around Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnet No. 123 from the Années de pèlerinage, but as this bewitching piano work supplies the heart of the matter, an ensemble of 18 players further delineates the tragic and volatile world the lovers inhabit. Scene from ‘The Divine Woman’ (1928)

9 minutes

This fascinating 9-minute fragment from Garbo’s lost film features the star as Marianne entertaining her lover, a French Foreign Legionnaire. While she persuades him to stay the night with her rather than report for duty, telling close-ups foreshadow his downfall. This scene, in which Davis makes use of the March of the Foreign Legion, makes an ideal concert-opener to Flesh and the Devil which requires the same 60-piece orchestra.

For further information about the Faber Music silent film catalogue please contact Helen McLean at: silentfilms@fabermusic.com 020 7908 5332

Lillian Gish Broken Blossoms (1919)

90 minutes

Set in both China and London’s East End, Broken Blossoms tells the story of an idealistic young Chinese poet whose love for the 15-year-old daughter of a drunken boxer leads to tragedy and a finale of shocking violence. Seen by many as the first Art Film, it provides Gish with one of her most moving roles. Davis has arranged and updated Louis Gottschalk’s original 1919 score to enhance the exotic atmosphere and drama when necessary, and extended certain passages to fit the director D. W. Griffith’s extended cut. The Wind (1928)

80 minutes

Gish gives a staggering performance of a woman on the edge in this story of a sheltered Virginian girl who goes to live in the hostile environment of the Texan prairies and is driven to distraction by isolation and violence. The wind of the title becomes one of the film’s most haunting and violent protagonists, and is marvellously evoked by Davis, not only with apt orchestral effects, but by an eerie and ominous Native American beat that builds to the terrifying climax of the storm. An Unseen Enemy (1912)

16 minutes

For D. W. Griffith’s exhilarating thriller short in which two girls are trapped and shot at by burglars, Davis translates the style of piano improvisation to the forces of a piano trio, and admirably evokes the film’s melodramatic sentimentality.

Clara Bow It (1927)

76 minutes

Coined in Elinor Glyn’s book of the same title, the word ‘It’ denoted sex appeal. The word became synonymous with the film’s star, Bow, who plays a spunky sales assistant who aspires to marry the store’s owner. A jazzy 15-player score from Davis, infused with the infectious dance rhythms of the Twenties, animates the work’s strong conflicts and flirtatious love scenes. Wings (1927)

136 minutes

This exhilarating action epic about war in the air celebrates the bravery of early flyers. The grandeur of aerial scenes made the film a smash hit, winning it the first ever Oscar for Best Film. Davis’s symphonic score animates superbly the breath-taking excitement of flight, as well as the film’s tragic denouement.

images: GRETA GARBO in ‘The Mysterious Lady’; lillian gish in ‘the wind’; clara bow in ‘it’

SILENT FILM, EDUCATION AND BOOKS

Waterman Receives Lifetime Achievement Award On 25th February, the Music Teacher Awards honoured Dame Fanny Waterman with their Lifetime Achievement Award. The evening, which celebrated excellence in music and performing arts education, was held at the Jumeirah Carlton Hotel, Knightsbridge, and was attended by industry guests including teachers, hub leaders, musicians and VIPs – representing the best and brightest in performing arts education. Dame Fanny is a living legend in the world of music and has been recognised as one of the twentieth century’s most inspirational women. As well as co-founder of the renowned Leeds International Piano Competition, she is a teacher of international reputation, a respected clinician and adjudicator, and author of over 30 piano teaching books. Her best-selling Me and My Piano and Piano Lessons tutors have been used by generations of beginners worldwide. Her extraordinary success and eminent position in the piano teaching world stem from her concentration on security of technique placed at the disposal of imagination and musicianship. In 2015, at the age of 95, Dame Fanny retired as Chairman of the Leeds International Piano Competition. At the same time, she published her autobiography, Dame Fanny Waterman: My Life in Music, and continues to involve herself in music education through projects such as Young Audiences, Live Music Now! and the Harrogate Festival, explaining that ‘you’re born with a passion for music and it never leaves you’. Author and friend of Dame Fanny, Alan Bennett says, ‘Dame Fanny Waterman is not someone to be trifled with. This is a woman who, well into her nineties, thinks nothing of flying to Beijing one week and Toronto the next. She is a phenomenon and she is unique.’ Dame Fanny Waterman: My Life in Music available from fabermusicstore.com priced at £20.00 (ISBN 0-571-53918-1) also available for Amazon Kindle

A New Release from Faber & Faber Beethoven for a Later Age – The Journey of a String Quartet Edward Dusinberre ‘They are not for you but for a later age!’ Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets.

Tackling the Beethoven quartets is a rite of passage that has shaped the Takács Quartet’s work together for over forty years. Using the history of the composition and first performances of the quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993 – recounts the life of the Quartet from its inception in Hungary, through emigration to the US and its present-day life as one of the world’s renowned string quartets. He also describes what it was like for him, as a young man fresh out of the Juilliard School, to join the Quartet as its first non-Hungarian member – an exhilarating challenge. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the life of a quartet, vividly showing how four people enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation – a theme that also lies at the heart of Beethoven’s remarkable compositions. ‘A richly detailed portrayal of the intimate workings of a great string quartet, in this case the magical Takács, as revealed to us through the recollections of its first violinist. Fascinating certainly to someone working in another artistic realm entirely.’ Philip Roth

ISBN 0780571317134 Hardback £18.99

Warp Publishing & Anna Meredith

Tours Sigurðsson’s Whale-Watching Tour comes to USA To mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of his Bedroom Community record label, Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson takes to the road in March and April this year, as the label’s ‘Whale Watching Tour’ travels to the USA. Sigurðsson will be joined by fellow founders, Nico Muhly and Ben Frost, together with other Community artists Sam Amidon, Nadia Sirota, Borgar Magnason, Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Helgi Jónsson. The tour commences in Providence (RI) on 25 March before travelling to New York (NY), Washington (DC), Durham (NC), Pittsburgh (PA), Columbus (OH) and finishing in Knoxville (TN) on 2 April, as part of the Big Ears Festival. The programme will comprise new and old material from across Sigurðsson’s output, including pieces from Architecture of Loss and Dreamland.

Silent Film Faber Music is pleased to announce a brand-new collaboration with Warp Publishing and UK composer, Anna Meredith. A composer, producer and performer of both acoustic and electronic music, Meredith’s sound has been described as ‘maximalist’ ‘uncategorisable’ and ‘genre-hopping’. Her new material marries the different worlds of contemporary classical, Avant-pop, electronica and experimental rock. Her music is regularly performed in a host of high-profile and unusual contexts. From The Last Night of the Proms to flashmob body percussion at the M6 services, from PRADA fashion campaigns to films, pop and classical festivals, and major concert halls. Testimony to her genre-defying output is the fact that she has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1,2, 3, 4 and 6. Meredith’s ground-breaking body-percussion piece, Handsfree, was commissioned for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and performed by them at the BBC Proms in 2012. She followed it up with Connect It, for the BBC’s inaugural Ten Pieces project, reaching half the UK’s primary school children during 2015. Other notable works include her Concerto for Beatboxer & Orchestra, and Smatter Hauler (premiered by the Aurora Orchestra at the 2015 Proms). Faber Music will manage hire rights for Meredith’s performance and stage works and aim to secure new commissions, create film/TV synch and score opportunities, as well as promote performances and recordings of her works, all in collaboration with Warp Publishing.

The Battle of the Somme Centenary Tour We are delighted to announce that the Somme100 FILM project has over 50 live orchestral performances confirmed for 2016. These are all live screenings of the iconic film The Battle of the Somme with Laura Rossi’s acclaimed score. There are many more performances in the pipeline, which we will be announcing soon, but we still need a few more orchestras to help us reach the target of 100. Your orchestra can help The Battle of the Somme film reach audiences on a national scale, in the same way it did 100 years ago: In 1916 it was shown in 18 countries and watched by half the adult UK population – a box office record not beaten until Star Wars in 1977. The tour will get a huge amount of publicity as The Battle of the Somme will be a key part of the Centenary events. The Imperial War Museum is offering the film free of charge for performance with Laura Rossi’s score up until 15 July 2017, so it’s not too late to schedule a performance with your orchestra. The participants already confirmed include a host of professional, amateur and youth orchestras, who will be performing with the 74-minute film in a wide variety of venues from cathedrals and concert halls, to schools, theatres and community centres worldwide. Please visit Somme100FILM.com for more details and to sign up to this exciting international project.

There has been widespread acclaim for Meredith’s two electronic EPs, ‘Black Prince Fury’ and ‘Jet Black Raider’, and this new relationship ties in with the release of Anna’s debut album ‘Varmints’. It was released on Moshi Moshi/PIAS on 4 March and kicks off at a launch gig with her band at the ICA in London on 29 March, part of a UK and European tour. Also upcoming are three performances of the recorder concerto Origami Songs by the Nederlands Kamerorkest, the US premiere of Handsfree by the Utah Youth Symphony, as well as a new ballet for Post:Ballet in San Francisco.

Faber Musicals site launches

Tenebrae to release L’Estrange choral album April sees the release of the much-anticipated ‘On Eagles’ Wings’, a album of Alexander L’Estrange’s sacred choral repertoire from worldrenowned chamber choir Tenebrae on Signum Classics. The sixteen tracks, which range from stunning settings of traditional liturgical texts such as the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis and The Lord’s Prayer, to rousing anthems and heart-warming Christmas gems, are performed with the passion and precision synonymous with Tenebrae. The choir will perform all of the pieces on 7 April 2016 in the church of St James’s Spanish Place, London, with a workshop that morning at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘One gorgeous piece after another, in pristine, dew-fresh performances by the ever-wonderful choir Tenebrae. L’Estrange is a many-sided composer of prodigious gifts, and this is an album I will return to again and again; I recommend it warmly to all lovers of choral music.’ John Rutter

Choral Publication of an Icelandic viral classic

Just launched is our Faber Musicals site! It’s a rich portal of discovery for the diverse musicals that we now represent. These include gems from the Warner/Chappell catalogue such as Bugsy Malone, Camelot, Brigadoon, High Society and Paint Your Wagon. From the Faber catalogue there is the richly rewarding output of Howard Goodall, with works such as the dreaming, Girlfriends, The Hired Man, Days of Hope, A Winter’s Tale and The Kissing-Dance. Then there’s Adam Cork’s much-lauded NFT show London Road, Martin Ward’s acclaimed youth operas The Fizz and The Whale Savers, Carl Davis’s The Mermaid, and school shows from respected figures such as Lin Marsh, Sheila Wilson and Pam Wedgwood. The new site is packed full of information, with cast and instrumentation lists, synopses, audio clips, previewable scores, production shots, filters by age, cast size and themes, pricing and downloadable application packs, all designed to enable licensing to take place with the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of fuss. Explore at fabermusicals.fabermusic.com

‘The Kissing-Dance’ returns to London Howard Goodall’s delightful musical The Kissing-Dance returned to London courtesy of a new production from All Star Productions. Reviews to follow in the next issue.

Ward’s ‘steampunk opera’ premieres Martin Ward’s new chamber opera, Clocks 1888: The Greener is to premiere in the UK in April. Staged by Brolly Productions, it launches at Cast, Doncaster on 15-16 April, before transferring to Hackney Empire for performances on 22-22 April. A brilliant young migrant girl, the Greener, is single-handedly running the towering clock that is the beating heart of the East End, but when she is discovered by a gentleman explorer they are forced to choose between the worlds they know, or each other. This new opera gives voice to the real East End of immigration, imagination and incredible invention set against a visually stunning animated design.

When Icelandic rock band Árstídir sang an a cappella work by fellow countryman Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson in a German train station in 2013, they could not possibly have known that the video would go on to become a viral hit, with over 5 million views to date. The work in question, Heyr, himna smiður (‘Hear, Smith of Heavens’) was already well-known throughout Iceland and sets a 12th-century text by Icelandic chieftain, Kolbein Tumason. But that video in particular brought it to a worldwide audience. We are now delighted to announce an exclusive publishing representation for the 3-minute piece and have currently made four versions available on sale (SATB, SSAA, SSA and TTBB). Other versions are in preparation, including one for brass band.

Stage Works 27

Recent Orchestral Scores from Faber Music HEAD OFFICE

Colin Matthews: Turning Point Colin Matthews’s Turning Point (2006) represents a bold stylistic breakthrough. Out of a whirring, motoric scherzo comes a jolting sea change: an austere, glacial string chorale of searing intensity that, with gritty resilience, gradually comes to overwhelm everything else. Commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, this 25-minute journey from complex momentum to expressive simplicity displays all the ingenious craft we have come to expect from Matthews, together with a new-found emotional directness.

Faber Music Ltd Bloomsbury House 74–77 Great Russell St London WC1B 3DA www.fabermusic.com Promotion Department: +44(0)207 908 5311/2 promotion@fabermusic.com

Sales & Hire

‘Awash with energy and ideas, the piece scored a palpable hit.’

FM Distribution Burnt Mill Elizabeth Way Harlow, Essex CM20 2HX Sales: +44(0)1279 82 89 82 sales@fabermusic.com Hire: +44(0)1279 82 89 07/8 hire@fabermusic.com

Financial Times (Richard Fairman), 31 July 2013

Full Score (ISBN 0-571-53944-0) available from fabermusicstore.com priced at £24.99

USA & CANADA Hire

Orchestral works

J U L I A N A N D E R S O N . FA N TA S I A S

JULIAN ANDERSON

Schott Music Corp & European American Music Dist LLC 254 West 31st Street, 15th Floor New York, NY 10001, USA Promotion: (212) 4616940 Rental: (212) 4616940 DIPTYCH (1991/5)

THE CRAZED MOON (1997)

THE STATIONS OF THE SUN (1998)

THE BIRD SINGS WITH ITS FINGERS (2000) Four choreographic sketches for chamber orchestra

Julian Anderson: Fantasias

JULIAN ANDERSON

Written as part of a residency with The Cleveland Orchestra, Fantasias (2009) was Julian Anderson’s first multi-movement work for orchestra. This 23-minute showpiece abounds in vivid contrasts, from the jagged brass fanfares with which it opens to the headlong rush of its dazzling finale. At its heart is an extended and evocative nocturne, overflowing with all manner of brilliantly imagined sounds which its composer describes as a ‘musical rainforest’.

Fantasias FOR ORCHESTRA

SHIR HASHIRIM (2001) for soprano and orchestra

IMAGIN'D CORNERS (2002) SYMPHONY (2003) EDEN (2005)

Sales

HEAVEN IS SHY OF EARTH (2006)

‘One of Anderson’s scintillating scores, rhythmically intricate, rich in unexpected and often eerie sounds, and with a vein of lyricism…’

for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra

ALLELUIA (2007)

Alfred Music Publishing Co. Customer Service P.O. Box 10003 Van Nuys CA 91410-0003, USA Tel: +1 (818) 891-5999 sales@alfred.com for chorus and orchestra

HARMONY (2013) for choir and orchestra

The Evening Standard (Nick Kimberly), 9 August 2009

Full Score (ISBN 0-571-53884-3) available from fabermusicstore.com priced at £24.99

ISBN10: 0-571-53884-3 EAN13: 978-0-571-53884-3

fabermusic.com

Written & devised by Sam Wigglesworth with contributions from Lauren Beech, Helen McLean and Tim Brooke Designed by Sam Wigglesworth and Dave Warden cover image: anders hillborg © Mats Lundqvist

Francisco Coll: Piano Concertino Francisco Coll’s brilliant and unpredictable Piano Concertino No seré yo quien diga nada (‘I’m not saying nothing’) is one of his most striking scores to date. Written for Nicolas Hodges this four-movement work, with its idiosyncratic instrumentation (a bottom-heavy ensemble of lower strings, wind, brass and percussion), flinty harmonies and taut rhythmic profile made a strong and lasting impression on audiences. ‘An elegant, feisty showpiece, full of vividly imagined ideas and quicksilver changes of direction and mood.’ The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 12 June 2014

Full Score (ISBN 0-571-53898-3) available from fabermusicstore.com priced at £16.99

fabermusic.com