Fortissimo Autumn 2016

FABER MUSIC NEWS — AUTUMN 2016

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THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL ‘A turning point for Adès and, it felt, for opera itself.’

THE OBSERVER

Plus Carl Davis at 80 Faber Music Acquires Anders Hillborg Back Catalogue Oliver Knussen awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music Francisco Coll makes an impressive Proms debut

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

The Exterminating Angel In what was surely one of the operatic highlights of the year, Adès’s third opera, after Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador, premiered 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 was commissioned by Salzburg in co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden where it opens in April 2017), the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Royal Danish Opera.

Dear colleagues, Our cover story, Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, is a project that has concerned its composer for as long as I have known him: around 25 years. Its completion also marks a major milestone for Faber Music – the journey to secure rights from the heirs of the film’s creators, Luis Bunuel and Luis Alcoriza, having begun as early as 2001.

But rising above the vicissitudes of a long creative journey, is now the reality of the opera itself. The opening night in Salzburg on July 27 is an occasion I will never forget.

With Tom Cairns, Adès’s collaborator on the libretto, directing, and the composer himself conducting, there was a unanimity of thought and realisation that created an overwhelming experience.

The strangeness of the story, centring on a mysterious inability to act, when coupled with the music’s opposing sense of inexorable direction, purpose and virtuosity made for an enthralling evening.

Whilst we have reproduced a selection of the reactions from the press, what cannot be captured here is the extraordinary reception in the auditorium – a rapturous standing ovation which went on and on, and which was repeated at the subsequent performances.

This remarkable opera now travels to London, New York and Copenhagen, with the strong likelihood of a high definition cinema relay from the Met in late 2017.

Don’t miss it!

Buñuel’s classic film, a parable on the ‘bourgeois condition’, sees a collection of society’s grandees surreally trapped together in a room.

In no time at all their veneer of sophistication cracks, and society and its interrelations are brutally placed under the microscope. Featuring a jaw-dropping line-up of operatic talent (15 principals who remain on stage for the majority of the piece), The Exterminating Angel is a true ensemble opera, and the skill with which Adès delineates the many intricacies and undercurrents present over its densely-packed span (just under two hours plus interval) is breathtaking.

Like the shipwrecked characters of The Tempest, the cast of this new opera are held in a state of entrapment and dramatic stasis. Like the glittering high-society world of Powder Her Face, the dinner party guests are denizens of a nightmarish world of aristocratic pretension.

‘In a sense, this is a child of those two operas,’ Adès observed, ‘but that comparison has receded, and this opera is a very different animal. Probably a scarier animal.’

In the pit a large and masterfully deployed orchestra is prominently coloured by guitar, piano and ondes martenot – the latter (played here by the world’s leading virtuoso, Cynthia Millar) soaring above proceedings as a eerie manifestation of the nameless force that ensnares the guests. In one interlude, massed off-stage drums thunder insistently, elsewhere countertenor Iestyn Davies sings a rapturous ode to coffee spoons and the young lovers Eduardo and Beatriz (Ed Lyon and Sophie Bevan) sing a tender suicide-pact duet.

Audrey Luna (who previously sang Ariel in The Tempest), sings the stratospheric role of Leticia, whose blazing final aria seems to offer liberation. The opera is open ended, however, concluding with a return of the chiming bells with which it opened, and the chorus intoning a repeated fragment of the Requiem Mass. There is no final double bar.

The Exterminating Angel (2015-16) Sally Cavender Performance Music Director/Vice Chairman, Faber Music

opera in three acts. Duration c. 115 minutes.

Text: Tom Cairns in collaboration with the composer. Based on the screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza (English) Cast of 22 singers plus chorus LUCIA(S)/LETICIA(High ColS)/LEONORA(M)/SILVIA(S)/ BLANCA(M)/BEATRIZ(S)/NOBILE(T)/RAÚL(T)/ COLONEL(HighBar)/FRANCISCO(CT)/EDUARDO(LyricT)/ RUSSELL(BBar)/ROC(BBar)/DOCTOR(B)/JULIO(Bar)/ LUCAS(T)/ENRIQUE(T)/PABLO(Bar)/MENI(S)/ CAMILLA(M)/PADRE(Bar)/YOLI(BoyTr)/CHORUS For full instrumentation details please see page 22 Commissioned by the 2016 Salzburg Music Festival, the Royal Opera Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera New York, and the Royal Danish Opera

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HIGHLIGHTS

‘Three live sheep, trained to the highest operatic standards, mooch on stage. Bells chime. Servants depart just as dinner guests in jewels and finery arrive. “Enchanted, enchanted”, they intone some two dozen times between them on variants of the same musical rise and fall. It’s the start of an evening that, for them, will prove anything but. Then they repeat the process, the orchestra scrunching and cavorting in elegant, seductive mayhem, a mood of crazed waltz in the air and sinister expectation. If these guests are enchanted, we the audience are already bewitched…

‘A turning point for Adès and, it felt, for opera itself.’

When the composer, who also conducted, took his bow, the audience rose in prolonged ovation. This was a momentous evening: a turning point for Adès and, it felt, for opera itself…

It’s as if all music is buoyantly alive and coexisting in its two-hour span… This is no idle game of spot the composer.

Prodigious from early childhood, Adès has devoured, lived and breathed everything that caught his ear, letting all manner of music nourish his imagination. We expect artists and writers to do this, yet with composers we inevitably reach for the adjective “eclectic” in a tone of mistrust. This precise quality is the essence of Adès’s style. It is easier to think of him as a musical polylinguist: in whichever tongue, the identity of the speaker is never in doubt. Patterns are set up, reshaped, challenged, subverted, all the strands, in every colour and ply, tightly woven and rhythmically daring…There are too many theatrical and musical coups to mention… Even from a passenger seat in the stalls, this angel soars aloft.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 31 July 2016

‘Some of Adès’s most powerful orchestral writing… The music is constantly fascinating… Cairns’s staging is as meticulously detailed as Adès’s score.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 29 July 2016

‘Brilliant… utterly assured writing, clever, effective, dazzling’ The Financial Times (Shirley Apthorpe), 29 July 2016

‘A true ensemble opera’ ‘The music pulses with searing power, frenetic breathlessness and an astringent harmonic language…

An exceptionally inventive and audacious score. I was swept along by the way Adès executes his vision… a true ensemble opera.’

The New York Times (Anthony Tomassini), 29 July 2016

‘Packed full of provocation and ideas… Amidst the brutal descent into anarchy, Adès’s skill at being ironic shines through time and again. It’s not every day that the premiere of an experimental opera receives a standing ovation.’

Der Spiegel (Werner Theurich), 29 July 2016

‘Intoxicating and at times quite brutal; for all its scorching passion, the opera leaves one chilled to the bone’ ‘The moments of rupture are articulated with precision and an unwavering awareness of the possibilities of the genre.

Bells ring, even before the audience is seated, submerging the habitual pre-performance rituals in a growing gloop of cleverly managed overtones… Other devices populate the score throughout, such as the use of chaconne structures, or the way the music lurches into a waltz when certain characters approach the threshold, drawing them back into the scene less by malicious force than by seduction…

Bechtler’s set and costumes mix Art Deco glamour with shrewd economy, while the revolving set, reinforces the roving perspective internal to the score… [This is] the opera Adès needed to write in order to be himself.

Like its predecessors, the music remains astonishing in its confidence and dramatic versatility; but here, when Adès’s elusive aesthetic itself becomes integrated into the drama’s vertiginous psychological landscape, the music acquires another edge entirely. The effect is intoxicating and at times quite brutal; for all its scorching passion, the opera leaves one chilled to the bone.’

The Times Literary Supplement (Guy Dammann), 19 August 2016

PHOTOS: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL © SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE/MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

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‘Adès is as compelling as any contemporary practitioner of his art because he is, first and foremost, a virtuoso of extremes. He is a refined technician, with a skilled performer’s reverence for tradition, yet he has no fear of unleashing brutal sounds on the edge of chaos. Although he makes liberal use of tonal harmony he subjects that material to shattering pressure. He conjures both the vanished past and the ephemeral present… Like Berg, the 20th-century master whom he most resembles, he pushes ambiguity to the point of explosive crisis… Never have Adès’s extremes collided more spectacularly… in his hands Buñuel’s cool, eerie scenario takes on a tragic volatility… Throughout, Adès pulls off the Stravinskyan feat of making prior styles sound like premonitions of his own… Liberation is achieved not only by a ritual of repetition but also through a visionary aria for Leticia…

When the spell of immobility resumes, seraphic harmonies give way to a colossal, demonic setting of fragments of the Libera Me, with bells ringing anarchic changes. On this note of mystical dread the opera closes, no exit in sight.’

The New Yorker (Alex Ross), 22 August 2016

‘Never have Adès’s extremes collided more spectacularly…’

‘The most important opera of the year, proves it’s here to stay… Remarkable… The audience gave its large, terrific cast and composer-conductor something rare in Salzburg: a full-out standing ovation… An opera of decadence quickly decaying… Whole musical forms, such as the waltz or the chaconne, fall apart just as the dinner party does… Adès’ conducting of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna brings out a whirlwind of orchestral colors.’

The LA Times (Mark Swed), 9 August 2016

Faber Music Acquires Hillborg Back Catalogue Following the signing of an exclusive world-wide publishing agreement with Anders Hillborg in November 2015, Faber Music is delighted to announce the acquisition of the majority of his back catalogue, formerly published by Edition Peters.

This includes all the works featured on the recently released, Swedish Grammy award-winning BIS record (Sirens, Beast Sampler, Cold Heat and O dessa ögon), as well as the many other works which have become established in the repertoires of orchestras and performing groups around the world. The complete list of works published by Faber Music can be viewed online.

Widely regarded as Sweden’s leading composer, Hillborg is that rare artist whose music strikes a chord across many different countries and cultures. His tactile, often playful, approach to sound has appealed to many major conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Alan Gilbert, Sakari Oramo, Kent Nagano, David Zinman and Gustavo Dudamel.

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IMAGES: EXCERPT FROM THE FULL SCORE OF ‘THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL‘ BY THOMAS ADÈS © FABER MUSIC; ANDERS HILLBORG © MATS LUNDQVIST

HIGHLIGHTS

Carl Davis: A Musical Polymath at 80

It’s hard to believe it from his boundless on-stage energy – or from his prolific output and creative zeal – but in October Carl Davis will celebrate his 80th birthday. One of the UK’s must respected musical figures, Davis is utterly unique: generous, versatile and marinated in the classical tradition, he has created a body of work that, whatever the genre, is borne out of his infectious desire to communicate.

Liverpool tribute Davis has been a conductor and close friend of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – and a firm favourite with their audience – for more than 50 years. On his birthday on 28 October, Davis joins the orchestra for an evening of music celebrating his life and work, introduced by presenter and friend Aled Jones. From the and exhilarating Chariot Race from Ben Hur to Davis’s music for the television classics Pride and Prejudice and The World at War, this evening promises to be a rich, unmissable tribute to one of the UK’s most versatile and best-loved composers.

A Giant of Stage and Screen Crowning Davis’s work in the realm of silent film is his ground-breaking score to Abel Gance’s 5 ½ -hour epic Napoléon – the longest of its kind ever composed – will be performed in November by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Davis, at the Royal Festival Hall. The performance will mark the release of a new digital version of the film, which will be shown in cinemas and made available on the BFI Player. In further recognition of his position as a giant of music for film and television, in June Davis was invited to conduct the BBC Philharmonic in a special edition of Radio 3’s Sound of Cinema programme devoted to his work. Presented by Matthew Sweet, the programme will be broadcast later this year.

Davis has recently completed work on his first score to an animated film. Based on Raymond Briggs’ award-winning graphic novel Ethel & Ernest, the film is directed by Roger Mainwood and will be shown on the BBC. A concert suite will be performed in Liverpool in October.

Carl Davis Selected forthcoming performances Nijinsky 23.9, 22.12.16, Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava, Slovakia; chor Daniel de Andrade

Pride and Prejudice Theme/The World at War Theme/Chariot Race from ‘Ben Hur’/ Ballade for cello and orchestra 28.10.16, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, UK: Jonathan Aasgaard/Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Carl Davis

High and Dizzy Canadian Premiere 29.10.16, Collier Street United Church, Barrie, ON, Canada: Huronia Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Balaburski

Napoléon

Insights into the life and work of a Maestro How do you bring a forgotten silent film back to life? What are the techniques behind writing a successful film score? How do you work with and inspire choreographers?

Published to mark his 80th birthday, Carl Davis: Maestro by Wendy Thomson offers a unique glimpse into the life and work of this consummate all-round musician, documenting his immense impact on the many spheres of music-making he has inhabited. Davis’s fascinating life story gives an insight into the prolific composing and conducting career of one of the world’s most celebrated film and television composers.

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

Safety Last 7.11.16, Tishman Auditorium, New School University, New York City, USA: Mannes School of Music/ David Hayes

Alice in Wonderland 25-28.12.16, Zuiderstrandtheater, Den Haag, The Netherlands: De Dutch Don’t Dance Division/ Residentie Orkest/Chors. Thom Stuart and Rinus Sprong

Carl Davis: Maestro (ISBN 0-571-53958-0) is available from October 2016 at fabermusicstore.com, priced at £25

PHOTO: CARL DAVIS © ROGER CANON

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Deo: A stunning Harvey disc from St John’s Cambridge

Deo, a new all-Harvey release from the choir of his alma mater, St John’s College, Cambridge, has been received with critical acclaim.

Released on Signum Classics, the disc includes premiere recordings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis with organ (1978), and Praise ye the Lord (1990). Also featured are two works commissioned by St John’s: The Royal Banners Forward Go (2004) and The Annunciation (2011), a 4-minute setting of Edwin Muir which was written to mark the College’s Quincentenary celebrations.The disc also includes two works for organ: Laus Deo (1969) and the astonishing (yet rarely heard) Toccata for organ and tape (1980). In the latter work, developed at IRCAM, an agile, brilliant organ part is set against an almost moto perpetuo stream of electronic sound.

‘Some contemporary music experts have considered Harvey’s church music to be of lesser importance than his instrumental works’, writes the choir’s Director of Music Andrew Nethsingha, ‘but I want to stress how imaginative, innovative and courageous Harvey was in pushing the boundaries of church music, without ever losing the intensity of spirituality which underpins all the great religious pieces... I regard Harvey’s kaleidoscopic Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis as one of the two most significant contributions to this genre in the past 50 years – a set of canticles for the age of space travel! One can never know for sure how a composer’s music will be regarded in later centuries, but it is my firm belief that the deepening trance of Harvey’s music will never break. Our journey of exploration of this music has been the most important and satisfying part of my musical career to date.’

‘This album pays wonderful tribute to Harvey. Works include the ecstatic Praise Ye the Lord and the richly challenging Missa Brevis… Harvey used to describe music coming out of silence and dissolving back into it. It’s a good starting point.

The Choir of St John’s tackles all with confidence and clarity.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 1 May 2016

‘Outstanding on every count: remarkable and underperformed repertoire...’

‘Harvey stretched the limits of Anglican church music in a way not seen, really since Tippett’s Evening Canticles, but did so with regularity and consistency… The Magnificat is epic in scope; it is hard to believe that it lasts just under eight minutes. Certainly these are difficult works, including various vocal techniques (whispering, glissandos, percussive repetition of consonants, etc) hardly common in the normal run of church music, but the investment the choir has clearly put into them really gives extraordinary results. Outstanding on every count: remarkable and underperformed repertoire, beautfully performed and recorded.’

Gramophone (Ivan Moody), July 2016

‘A questing, individual spirit.’

‘Harvey recalled how liberating he found writing for a cathedral-type choir. Perhaps that is why the music on this disc is so varied and inspiring… The Missa Brevis ranges from the numinous to the awestruck. A couple of organ works, one with electronic tape, maintain the aura of a questing, individual spirit.’

The Financial Times (Richard Fairman), 20 May 2016

‘In addition to being irresistible music, the works on this outstanding disc are crucial to understanding his output as a whole… I Love the Lord is more conventionally written, yet sounds almost as if electronics are involved in creating its mesmeric harmonic haloes.’

BBC Music Magazine (Christopher Dingle), August 2016

‘A valuable contribution to the Harvey discography and the composer’s growing posthumous reputation.’

Choir and Organ (Philip Reed), 8 August 2016

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PHOTO: JONATHAN HARVEY © MAURICE FOXALL

HIGHLIGHTS

Faber Focus: Works for oboe and orchestra

From Benjamin Britten and John Woolrich, to Anders Hillborg and Carl Vine, many Faber House Composers have been drawn to writing for the oboe. Here fortissimo takes a look at a diverse selection of concertos from the Faber Music catalogue.

Benjamin Britten - Temporal Variations In 1935 Britten hinted that a ‘large and elaborate suite for oboe and strings’ was underway. However, this work did not materialise and instead he wrote the Temporal Variatons for oboe and piano, dedicated to Montagu Slater, later the librettist of Peter Grimes.

In 1994, at the suggestion of oboist Nicholas Daniel, Colin Matthews arranged the piano part for string orchestra. The result is a dazzling 15-minute concertante work, supplementing Britten’s already rich contribution to the oboe repertory.

Anders Hillborg – Méditations sur Pétrarque As its title suggests, the mood of this limpid 12-minute work for oboe, percussion, harp, piano and strings is predominantly one of rapt contemplation. The soloist floats free, almost improvisatory solo lines over still, glassy string textures, which occasionally build to moments of searing intensity.

David Matthews – Oboe Concerto Unfolding over five short and highly contrasted movements, each with a different scoring, this charming 17-minute concerto was composed for Nicholas Daniel in 1992. One highlight comes with the joyous fourth movement, a homage to legendary blues pianist Montana Taylor, where the soloist is joined by winds, percussion as well pizzicato solo bass.

Nicholas Maw – Little Concert Composed in 1988, Maw’s Little Concert for oboe, strings and two horns shares with his Spring Music a preoccupation with finding a soundworld that is light in its specific gravity and tone, but that does not really fall into the category of light music. A common characteristic of both these works is a concentration on line – the presentation and development of melody, the acceptance of the primacy of song – as opposed to textural elaboration, developmental forms, and the like. This lyrical work is laid out in a very straightforward manner: a slow and episodic opening movement being followed by an energetic rondo.

Dominic Muldowney – Concerto Subtitled ‘a song cycle for oboe and orchestra’, this attractive 25-minute work displays Muldowney at his most lyrical, with teasing, fleeting resonances of Gershwin and Ravel rubbing shoulders with jazz and Latin-American rhythms, faded waltzes and expansive, endlessly dovetailing melodies. Four brilliantly orchestrated ‘songs’ are surrounded by oboe recits accompanied by percussion.

‘A series of rapt melodic effusions trace out a musical path that becomes ever more lyrical and extrovertly emotional.’

BBC Music Magazine 1994

Carl Vine – Concerto Commissioned by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra in 1996, Carl Vine’s Oboe Concerto is permeated with energetic rhythms and brilliant, snaking arabesques for the soloist. An ear-catching 16-minute showcase, it enjoys two commercial recordings to date.

John Woolrich – Concerto The concerto form has long been a central fascination for Woolrich, and his 1996 Oboe Concerto, where the fragile keening of the soloist is set against the brutal power of a large symphony orchestra, is one of his most dramatic, and poetic statements. The solo instrument is surrounded, figuratively in the music and literally onstage, by a group of its own type: three oboes together with their more extrovert and brazen second cousin the soprano saxophone.

‘It has a distinctive feel, the textures are crisp and vivid, has solved the problem of balancing the relatively slender sound of an oboe against a full orchestra in an ingenious and convincing way.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 16 August 1996

‘The lasting impression was of sheer melodiousness.’

The Independent (Nicholas Williams), 16 August 1996 -

For more oboe repertoire ideas, including chamber works by Tansy Davies, Oliver Knussen and John Woolrich, as well as both Colin and David Matthews, please visit fabermusic.com

PHOTOS: BENJAMIN BRITTEN; JOHN WOOLRICH © MAURICE FOXALL; DAVID MATTHEWS © CLIVE BARDA

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Anders Hillborg Selected forthcoming performances

Anders Hillborg A second Violin Concerto

Violin Concerto No. 1

Hillborg’s first Violin Concerto, composed in the early 90s, is a pivotal work in his oeuvre. Composed in the wake of his highly experimental Clang & Fury and Celestial Mechanics – both of which employ complex and unconventional tuning systems – the concerto displays a more pragmatic approach, though the drama it sets up is far from conventional, with a very fluid soloist-orchestra relationship. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who recorded it, has described it as one Hillborg’s best pieces.

5-6.10.16, Music Centre, Helsinki; 17.12.16, Likuntahalli, Suomussalmi; 18.12.16, Kaukametsä, Kajaani; 19.12.16, Musiikkikeskus, Kuopio; 20.12.16, Concert Hall, Mikkeli, Finland: Pekka Kuusisto/Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/ Hannu Lintu

Kongsgaard Variations 9.10.16, St Mary the Virgin, East Bergholt, Suffolk, UK: Calder Quartet

Hymn of Echoes/ Incantation premiere of new arrangement for string orchestra 14.10.16, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Martin Fröst/Amsterdam Sinfonietta

Violin Concerto No. 2 World premiere 20, 22.10.16, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden: Lisa Batiashvili/ Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo German premiere 27-28.10.16, Gewandhaus, Leipzig, Germany: Lisa Batiashvili/ Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig/ Alan Gilbert

Six Pieces for Wind Quintet 26-27.10.16, Kungliga Operan, Stockholm, Sweden: Royal Wind Quintet Stockholm

Incantation/Hymn of Echoes/Hyper Run/ Primal Blues/Hyper Exit 24-25.11.16, Konserthus, Oslo, Norway: Martin Fröst/Oslo Philharmonic

new work World premiere 2.3.17, Konserthuset, Örebro; 4.3.17, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden: Pekka Kuusisto/Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Thomas Dausgaard

...lontana in sonno...

17.3.17, Aula, Universitetet i Oslo, Oslo, Norway: Tora Augestad/ Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Karen Kamensek

Scream Sing Whisper*/Piano Concerto *Swedish premiere 27.4.17, Konserthuset, Västerås, Sweden: Henrik Måwe/Vasteras Musiksalskap/Christian Karlsen

Beast Sampler Finnish premiere 19.5.17, Music Centre, Helsinki, Finland: Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo

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Starry nights and cosmic chords Anders Hillborg’s Strand Settings, four atmospheric songs to poems by Mark Strand for soprano and orchestra, received their UK premiere in February as part of Renée Fleming’s ‘Artist Spotlight’ residency at the Barbican.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Sakari Oramo, who has also recorded the songs with Fleming and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic for release on Decca. The work sees Hillborg sustain an intense – often brooding – lyricism for over 23-minutes, with supple vocal writing set against drifting clouds of divided strings that are underlit by shimmering glass harmonica.

‘The BBC SO floating ecstatically under the burning recitative in the opening Black Sea, ambling into urban jazz in the set’s scherzo… mysterious, marvellously atmospheric and moving…’

The Times (Geoff Brown), 9 February 2016

‘Thrillingly scored, Hillborg’s vital, shimmering accompaniments never overpowered, always allowing space for the voice.’

The Guardian (George Hall), 9 February 2016

Now, over 20 years later, a second violin concerto – this time for Lisa Batiashvili – will be premiered in October by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo. The Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig and Alan Gilbert give the German premiere a week after, with performances by the concerto’s other co-commissioners, the Minnesota and Seoul Philharmonic orchestras, following in 2017.

Brandenburg companion for Kuusisto As part of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s project to commission companion pieces to J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Hillborg will write a 15-minute response to the Third Concerto, to be premiered and recorded with violinist Pekka Kuusisto in March 2017. Kuusisto also performs Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No. 1 across Finland with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Hannu Lintu in late 2016.

A new edition of a choral classic Composed in the mid-80s, Hillborg’s mesmerising Mouyayoum for 16-part mixed choir is his most performed work, and has been widely recorded. Faber Music is pleased to announce the publication of a new edition of this tour de force, which clarifies numerous important aspects of notation. A study in ever-shifting tone colours, it draws its inspiration from overtone singing, creating an intricate 13-minute tapestry of sound which draws on influences as diverse as Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

‘It unfolded in huge unhurried paragraphs, Fleming trailing her phrases of memory and longing across the music’s static chords, like the stars against the night sky so beautifully evoked in the poems. Starry nights, huge “cosmic” chords, feelings of regret – how easily these elements could have congealed into something sentimental and facile. It’s a tribute to Fleming’s artistry, and Hillborg’s subtlety, that they never did.’

The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 6 February 2016

‘There is a dark, nocturnal quality to the texts that Hillborg puts across effectively… Hillborg’s setting of the English language is excellent. The orchestral interjections explore a range of styles but it all coheres, thanks to those long string pedals and the composer’s keen focus on the texts.’

The Artsdesk (Gavin Dixon), 6 February 2016

PHOTO: ANDERS HILLBORG © MATS LUNDQVIST

The score of Mouyayoum, priced at £10.99, is available from the Faber Music Store (ISBN 0-571-56886-X)

TUNING IN

David Matthews In the Studio Long-time supporters of Matthews, the BBC Philharmonic under Jac van Steen recorded Matthews’s Symphony No.8 and Toward Sunrise in June, at Media City, Salford, for release on Chandos. Th ​ e disc will also include Matthews’s A Vision of the Sea which the orchestra has already recorded under Juanjo Mena.

Stotijn to sing Dvorák arrangements

Reimagining lost Vaughan Williams Norfolk March, Matthews’s new orchestral piece constructed around the programme note of the lost Norfolk Rhapsody No.3 by Vaughan Williams, received its first performance in April at the English Music Festival at Dorchester Abbey, where the BBC Concert Orchestra was conducted by Martin Yates. The 10-minute work – which also commemorates the First World War – will be taken up by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in November.

In December, world-renowned mezzo soprano Christianne Stotijn will join the Nash Ensemble for a performance of Matthews’s arrangements of the Dvořák Love Songs Op. 83 at the Wigmore Hall. This 16-minute collection for medium voice and string quintet also exists in a version for string orchestra. Stotijn is the latest in a string of worldclass singers to take up Matthews’s arrangements, Thomas Hampson having toured his versions of songs by Schubert, Mahler and Wolf with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta in 2014.

Meanwhile, another set of arrangements by Matthews – his inventive string orchestra versions of two Chopin Nocturnes (Op. 37 No. 2 and Op. 55 No. 1) – will feature in a Scottish Ensemble tour in the spring.

Kreutzer Quartet survey continues The fourth volume of Toccata Classics’s ongoing survey of Matthews’s string quartets with the Kreutzer Quartet was released in February. The disc includes the String Quartet No. 11 alongside Matthews’s Beethoven transcriptions.

‘A work with its own very clear sense of purpose and some moments of strange, inward magic… unlike anything else in modern quartet writing.’’

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

Sonatina World premiere 7.10.16, William Alwyn Festival, Holy Trinity Church, Blythburgh, Suffolk, UK: Linda Merrick/SarahJane Bradley/Nathan Williamson (Chaconne only) 2.11.16, St Olave’s Church, Hart Street, London, UK: Trio Elfin

Norfolk March 13.11.16, Pavilion Theatre, Bournemouth, UK: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Victor Aviat

Sonatina 20.10.16, The Old Divinity School, St John’s College, Cambridge, UK: Krysia Osostowicz/Daniel Tong

London premiere 10.5.17, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Gillian Keith/Orchestra Nova/George Vass

Dawn Chorus 20.6.17, St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham, UK: Ex Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore

A delightful Piano Concerto

Classical Source (Robert Matthew-Walker), 17 July 2016

5.10.16, Finnish Embassy, London, UK: Sami Väänänen

Three Housman Songs

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 30 May 2016

‘Fluently attractive… A splendidly effective work of complete accomplishment, with many delightful touches, especially in the final bars, guaranteed to catch any audience out.’

Variations for Piano

4.2.17, University of Hull, Hull, UK: Fenella Humphreys/Libby Burgess

‘It begins as totally plausible Vaughan Williams pastiche, then takes a much darker, more dissonant turn, boiling up into an Ives-like concatenation of ideas before subsiding to an uneasy close.’

This summer saw a plethora of performances of Matthews’s Piano Concerto. Helen Reid presented the work in Greenwich with the St Paul’s Sinfonia in June, whilst Clare Hammond and the Presteigne Festival Orchestra under George Vass performed the work in August. Thomas Nickell and The Orchestra of the Swan gave performances in Stratford-Upon-Avon and London at Kings Place.

David Matthews Selected forthcoming performances

Arrangements

Nicholas Maw ‘American Games’ revisited If Nicholas Maw is best known as a master of expansive, often melancholy, musical statements, his riveting American Games for symphonic wind band displays a different side of his fascinating output. Unfolding as one continuous span, this driving, dynamic 7-movement work is filled with rhythmic zest and a sophisticated feeling for colour. Commissioned for the 1991 BBC Proms, the work was first performed there by the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra who will revive it in Manchester in November.

‘A sequence of dances which make up a vigorous rhythmic romp, brilliantly written for the instruments.’

Dvorák - Love Songs Op. 83 10.12.16, Wigmore Hall, London, UK: Nash Ensemble/Christianne Stotijn

Chopin - Two Nocturnes (Op.37 no.2 31.5.17, Caird Hall, Dundee; 4.6.17, Theatre Royal, Dumfries; 6.6.17, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness; 7.6.17, Glasgow, UK: Scottish Ensemble#

Nicholas Maw Selected forthcoming performances American Games 2.11.16, Brown Shipley Concert Hall, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK: Wind and Percussion of the RNCM Symphony Orchestra

The Guardian (Edward Greenfield), 25th July 1991

BBC Music Magazine (Stephen Johnson), July 2016

PHOTO: DAVID MATTHEWS © CLIVE BARDA; CHRISTIANNE STOTIJN © STEPHAN VANFLETEREN

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Francisco Coll Selected forthcoming performances

Francisco Coll Inspired by the surreal imagination of Franz Kafka, the 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.

Mural World premiere 23.9.16, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Luxembourg: Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg/ Gustavo Gimeno

‘The music introduced an edge that conveyed loneliness, dizziness and restlessness… Coll is effective in creating moods and situations, but perhaps the best virtue of the music is its transparency. Both the vocal lines and the writing for ensemble are perfectly calibrated, so that their combination produces a limpid and clear effect – not such a common skill in a composer so young.’

Spanish premiere 6.4.17, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia, Spain: Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana/George Pehlivanian 4.8.17, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, UK: National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain/Thomas Adès (touring)

Chanson et Bagatelle

Cultur Plaza (Rosa Solà), 23 May 2016

World premiere 19.11.16, Leeds, UK: Peter Moore/ Richard Uttley Ceci n’est pas un Concerto World premiere 10.12.16, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK: Elizabeth Atherton/Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/ Thomas Adès

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

Four Iberian Miniatures 15.3.17, KKL, Lucerne, Switzerland: Noa Wildschut/Lucerne Symphony Orchestra/James Gaffigan

Concerto Grosso ‘Invisible Zones’ World premiere 31.3-1.4.17, Auditorio Nacional de Música, Madrid, Spain: Cuarteto Casals/Orquesta Nacionales de Espana/David Afkham

Vestiges 21.5.17, Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, Essex, UK: Richard Uttley

‘Liquid Symmetries’ Following on from its US premiere at the Aspen Festival in 2015, Francisco Coll’s agile and brittle Liquid Symmetries for 15 players received its UK Premiere in June at St John’s Smith Square. Martyn Brabbins conducted the London Sinfonietta.

A number of virtuoso solo lines wind their way through this spiky and astringent 13-minute work – notably a jittery and gyrating muted trumpet solo and recurring, murmured viola statements. Surrealistic juxtapositions abound, no more so than in the work’s final movement, with its strange, cavernously empty tutti melody and the lone, slightly droll, cowbell – hitherto unheard – that sets up a typically enigmatic conclusion.

‘A dark, brilliantly inventive evocation of the anxieties of living in the modern age… The piece began as if fired from a gun, the bass and muted trumpet sprinting with jazz-like haste… Coll’s piece showed a young man troubled by the world.’

The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 2 June 2016

‘Music that seems to be crammed with ideas, which tumble over each other in a constant state of flux, sometimes bewildering but fabulously vivid.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 3 June 2016

‘Coll studied with Adès and has the same gift for ear-popping instrumentations.’

The Times (Richard Morrison), 3 June 2016

‘Opening with a flurry of high woodwind and a dominant thwack of high temple block and xylophone, the work has impressive fluency.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 5 June 2016

‘Café Kafka’ in Valencia After the success of its premiere in 2014, when the Sunday Times praised its ‘astonishing compositional assurance’, Coll’s 45-minute chamber opera Café Kafka received its Spanish premiere at the Palau de Les Arts, Valencia in May.

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PHOTO: FRANCISCO COLL © JUDITH COLL; PALAU DE LES ARTS REINA SOFÍA PRODUCTION OF CAFÉ KAFKA ©TATO BAEZA

Coll’s next vocal work, a tragi-comedy for soprano and ensemble of 15 players entitled Ceci n’est pas un Concerto – will be premiered by Elizabeth Atherton together with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Thomas Adès in December.

A new duo for trombone and piano Coll has composed an 8-minute piece for BBC New Generation Artist Peter Moore. Moore – the co-principal trombone of the London Symphony Orchestra – will premiere the work in November alongside Richard Uttley, the pianist who gave the first performance of Coll’s Vestiges at the 2015 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Entitled Chanson et Bagatelle, the piece was jointly commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Royal Philharmonic Society

‘Mural’ Expectation continues to mount for the premiere of Mural, a 25-minute orchestra work which opens the Luxembourg Philharmonic’s season in September, conducted by Gustavo Gimeno. Co-commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (who will tour it in 2017), this five-movement work took two years to complete. The forces employed are vast, and it will be fascinating to hear Coll’s electrifying musical personality unleashed on such an ambitious canvas.

TUNING IN

Matthew Hindson A dazzling Proms debut

Light is both a particle and a wave

Coll’s Four Iberian Minatures for violin and chamber orchestra received their London premiere at the BBC Proms in August, with violinist Augustin Hadelich and Britten Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Adès. In March 2017, James Gaffigan will conduct the 12-minute work with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and Noa Wildschut, a protégé of Anne-Sophie Mutter.

‘Hadelich brought bravura technique and personality to his sometimes soulful, sometimes flamboyant solo line as it filtered through the score’s lucid textures… Coll was making his debut as a Proms composer with this witty and attractive piece, whose heritage in the idioms of flamenco and tango was brazenly flaunted.’

The Guardian (George Hall), 16 August 2016

‘Like images of Spain seen through an insect’s eye.

Spanish elements such as tango and flamenco become flickers of light, colour and rhythm.’

The Finanical Times (Richard Fairman), 16 August 2016

‘Glittering with sharp, Andalusian light.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 21 August 2016

Benjamin Britten

10.9.2016, University of New South Wales, NSW, Australia: Australia Ensemble

Bright Red Overture 17-18.9.2016, Willoughby, NSW, Australia: Willoughby SO/Paul Fitzsimon

This Year’s Apocalypse

Port Arthur remembered To mark the 20th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, ABC Classics have digitally released the first recording of Matthew Hindson’s ‘Lament’, the beautiful slow movement from his extraordinary concerto for amplified cello In Memoriam. The recording, featuring cellist Sue-Ellen Paulsen with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Benjamin Northey, will also feature on an all-Hindson orchestral disc.

Commission launches new ensemble Premiering in Sydney on 4 October, Hindson’s new work for large ensemble, This Year’s Apocalypse, has been specially commissioned for the inaugural season of the Verbrugghen Ensemble. An Ensemble-in-Residence at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (where Hindson is Acting Head of School and Associate Dean), the new music group comprises internationally-acclaimed soloists and orchestral musicians, most of whom are faculty members. The work will be conducted by John Lynch, the group’s American director, who also oversaw the 2015 premiere of Hindson’s wind band work, Requiem for a City.

A fresh take on Schubert that continues to travel

Opera update Separated by a whole compositional lifetime, Benjamin Britten’s first and last operas, Paul Bunyan and Death in Venice, both receive high-profile German productions in the 16/17 season. Brigitte Fassbaender directs Britten’s fresh and ingenious telling of the American lumberjack myth (his largest, and only operatic, collaboration with WH Auden), at Oper Frankfurt in October. In spring 2017, Deutsche Oper Berlin stage Graham Vick’s production of Death in Venice.

Meanwhile, multimedia director and video artist Netia Jones’s acclaimed production of Curlew River (featuring the Britten Sinfonia and an outstanding cast led by Ian Bostridge as the Madwoman) travels to Madrid’s Teatro Real for a single performance in March.

PHOTOS: BENJAMIN BRITTEN; MATTHEW HINDSON

Matthew Hindson Selected forthcoming performances

Since its premiere in Brisbane in 2001, Hindson’s The Rave and the Nightingale for string quartet and string orchestra has become one of his most travelled large-scale works.

The 16-minute reimagining of Schubert’s final string quartet (No. 15 in G major, D. 887) has been performed throughout Australia, as well as in the UK, USA, Germany and Switzerland. It has also been choreographed by Matjash Mrozewski for the San Francisco Ballet. The piece will now to be taken up by The Australian Chamber Orchestra, who perform it with the Goldner String Quartet in Sydney on 6 October.

‘Scenes from Romeo & Juliet’ Good news for saxophone ensembles: a substantial 25-minute suite by Hindson, entitled Scenes from Romeo & Juliet, was premiered by the Nexas Saxophone Quartet on 28 May in Glebe, New South Wales. Featuring music from a 2015 ballet score Hindson composed in collaboration with Cyrus Meurant, the suite has been recorded and will be reprised by the Quartet as part of a CD launch party in November.

World premiere 4.10.2016, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Verbrugghen Ensemble/John Lynch

The Rave and the Nightingale 6.10.2016, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Goldner String Quartet/Australian Chamber Orchestra/Toby Thatcher 12.3.2017, Saarländisches Staatstheater, Saarbrücken, Germany: Saarquartett/Saarländisches Staatsorchester/Nicholas Milton

Scenes from Romeo & Juliet 19.11.2016, Glebe Justice Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Nexas Quartet

Pulse Magnet Polish premiere 22.11.2016, Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music, Bydgoszcz, Poland

Benjamin Britten Selected forthcoming performances Owen Wingrave 3-10.9.16, Peacock Theatre, London, UK: British Youth Opera/Southbank Sinfonia 19-28.11.16, Amphithéâtre, Opéra Bastille, Opéra Nationale de Paris, Paris, France: Opéra National de Paris/cond. Stephen Higgins/dir.

Tom Creed

Paul Bunyan 9-22.10.16, Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Oper Frankfurt/cond. Nikolai Petersen/dir.

Brigitte Fassbaender

Curlew River 4.3.17, Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain: Ian Bostridge/Mark Stone/Britten Sinfonia Voices/Britten Sinfonia/dir.

Netia Jones

Death In Venice 19.3-28.4.17, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Berlin, Germany: Deutsche Oper Berlin/cond. Donald Runnicles/dir.

Graham Vick

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Tansy Davies Selected forthcoming performances

Tansy Davies Orchestra, New York Philharmonic 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 UK and US premieres and who was a horn player himself. Davies is also at work on a solo horn work for MusikFabrik’s Christine Chapman will be premiered in Cologne in October.

Nature US premiere 1.10.16, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, The Juilliard School, New York, NY, USA: Andrew Hsu/New Juilliard Ensemble/Joel Sachs 20.4.17, Auer Performance Hall, Indiana University, Fort Wayne, IN, USA: Indiana New Music Ensemble/ David Dzubay

London premiere of ‘Falling Angel’

new solo horn work world premiere 18.10.16, WDR Funkhaus am Wallrafplatz, Cologne, NordrheinWestfalen, Germany: Christine Chapman (MusikFabrik)

Loopholes & Lynchpins/Forgotten Game 2/Aquatic 27.10.16, Carole Nash Recital Room, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK: Students from the RNCM

grind show (electric)/Iris 27.10.16, Brown Shipley Concert Hall, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK: Clark Rundell/RNCM New Ensemble/Mark Heron/Emma McPhilemy/Orr Guy

kingpin/The Beginning of the World/Residuum/ Falling Angel/Spine 27.10.16, Peel Hall, University of Salford, Salford, UK: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Antony Hermus

Troubairitz/Dark Ground 28.10.16, Carole Nash Recital Room, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK: Students from the RNCM

new work for four horns and orchestra world premiere 21.2.17, The Anvil, Basingstoke; 23.2.17, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: Philharmonia Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen US premiere

Manchester focus In October the Royal Northern College of Music and the BBC Philharmonic will host a two-day festival devoted to the bold and utterly distinctive music of Tansy Davies.

With four concerts and a total of 12 works spanning over a decade of creative activity, it will be the largest retrospective of her music to date. RNCM students will perform a selection of Davies’s chamber and ensemble works, including her feisty saxophone concerto Iris, and the BBC Philharmonic under Antony Hermus will present a number of larger-scale pieces at Salford’s Peel Hall.

This latter concert features two works for string orchestra, both of which reimagine music of the past. The Beginning of the World – receiving its first performance since its BBC Proms premiere back in 2013 – is an eerie yet buoyant 5-minute variation on Sellinger’s Round whilst Residuum has been described by Davies as ‘an imaginary replay of the residual energy of the Galliard from John Dowland’s Lachrymae, heard like an echo of ancient music in a modern time.’

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, 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 Philharmonia

Gleaming and incandescent – rounded but penetrating in its brightness, the distinctive peal of the steel drum permeates Falling Angel, Davies’s Anselm Kiefer-inspired ensemble work which received its London premiere from the London Sinfonietta in June. The German artist’s rough layers of impasto are paralleled in 17 minutes of thick and urgent textures; brazen fanfares, a murmuring film of horns and alto flute, and scraping, skirling dances from a host of shrill winds.

‘Falling Angel has lost none of its power to unsettle.

Davies’s ideas always came at us in the raw.’

The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 2 June 2016

‘Dense and intense, with abrasive fanfares and marches as well as a central, lyrical lament.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 5 June 2016

‘Full of raw, abrasive, insistently repeated refrains, it seemed an apt reflection of the ominous painting that inspired it.’

The Times (Richard Morrison), 3 June 2016

A journey to the dark heart of Goya Like Falling Angel, Davies’s dark and muscular grind show (electric) also draws its inspiration from the visual arts – in this case Goya’s visceral, almost expressionistic, The St Isidore Pilgrimage (reproduced below). Mirroring the image, where a procession of figures was painted over an earlier existing landscape, this work for five players and sampler pits the irregular dances of acoustic instruments against an electronic element depicting a sinister outside world. Recently given its US premiere by Bang on a Can at their Summer Music Festival, this 6-minute carnivalesque also features in the Davies focus in Manchester.

27, 29.4.17, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City; 28.4.17, Tilles Center, Long Island University, Brookville, NY, USA: New York Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen

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PHOTO: TANSY DAVIES © RIKARD ÖSTERLUND; FRANCISCO GOYA’S ‘LA ROMERÍA DE SAN ISIDRO’

TUNING IN

Colin Matthews Ravel reimagined Having commissioned Matthews’s orchestration of Ravel’s ‘Oiseaux Tristes’ from Miroirs – described by The Independent as a ‘4-minute gem’ after its premiere at the 2015 Proms – the BBC Philharmonic has now asked him to turn his hand to more of the suite. Matthews’s version of ‘La vallée des cloches’ will be premiered in Manchester in January conducted by Nicholas Collon, in a concert that also includes ‘Oiseaux Tristes’. In July, Collon revived the latter with the Brussels Philharmonic.

A ‘supple and lyrical’ Violin Concerto

Continuing birthday celebrations In the space of 6 weeks this summer Colin Matthews’s music received performances from the BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish, and BBC Welsh orchestras – an extraordinary testament to his place at the heart of British New Music. In October, students from the Royal College of Music, where Matthews holds the position of Prince Consort Professor of Composition, will mark his 70th birthday with a performance of his thrilling ...through the glass conducted by Thomas Zehetmair.

‘Berceuse for Dresden’ Composed in 2005 to commemorate the rebuilding of Dresden’s Frauenkirche, Matthews’s dark-hued Berceuse for Dresden received its London premiere at the BBC Proms in August, with cellist Leonard Elschenbroich and the Hallé Orchestra under Sir Mark Elder. Inspired by the Frauenkirche’s bells, Matthews transforms their pitches into arching solo lines, while their overtones provide the rich underlying harmonies. Recordings of the real bells, sounding from high in the Royal Albert Hall, brought the absorbing 11-minute work to an intense climax.

‘The mournfully expressive admixture of hope to grief, healing to despair, is extraordinarily moving.’

Classical Source (Mark Valencia), 16 August 2016

‘Touching… A song without words for the cello.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 18 August 2016

‘A rich journey from elegy to cautious resurrection.’

The Times (Neil Fisher), 18 August 2016

‘It’s easy to imagine the goosebumps audience members would have felt at its world premiere.’

The Telegraph (Ben Lawrence), 18 August 2016

Also making an appearance at this year’s Proms was Pluto, the renewer, Matthews’s thrilling 6-minute appendix to Holst’s The Planets. The Guardian, reviewing the performance by The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain under Edward Gardner, remarked on its ‘implicit and organic connection with the original suite.’

PHOTO: COLIN MATTHEWS © MAURICE FOXALL

A new release from NMC, showcasing three of Matthews’s large-scale orchestral pieces has been received with critical acclaim. His dark, Mahlerian Cortège (1988) is featured alongside his Cello Concerto No.2 (composed for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1996 and here given an impassioned performance by Anssi Karttunen). The 20-minute Violin Concerto from 2009 – performed by Leila Josefowicz and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen – has been particularly well received.

‘Lyrically rewarding… memorably orchestrated.’

BBC Radio 3 Record Review (Andrew McGregor), 25 June 2016

‘Josefowicz soars high above the orchestra as if on a thermal. [A] supple, lyrical concerto.’

The Guardian (Erica Jeal), 23 June 2016

‘A sensuous outpouring of lithe purpose and flow.’

BBC Music Magazine (Hellen Wallace), July 2016

Inspired by Edward Thomas Figures, suspended still and ghostly white, The past hovering as it revisits the light.

The closing lines of Edward Thomas’s ‘It Rains’ have lent a title to Figures, suspended, a 5-minute oboe solo Matthews has composed for the 4th Barbirolli International Oboe Festival and Competition. Matthews is also at work on a setting of the poem, to be premiered by baritone Roderick Williams and the Nash Ensemble in March 2017. (It’s not the first time Matthews has been drawn to the work of Thomas, having previously set his Out in the Dark in a 2006 NMC Songbook commission.)

Meanwhile, Thomas’s ‘The Trumpet’ features in Voices of the Air, for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra, commissioned to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the London Festival Chorus. Taking its name from a poem

by Katherine Mansfield, the five-movement work also sets poetry by Dickinson, Tagore and Longfellow.

Masterful writing for the Oboe Dedicated to Matthews in his 70th birthday year, a new recording from the Berlin Oboe Quartet includes his two Oboe Quartets from the 1980s, the second of which was written for them. The release, on Costa Records, also includes Matthews’s arrangement of Schumann’s ‘Mondnacht’ from his Liederkreis Op. 39.

Colin Matthews Selected forthcoming performances Un Colloque Sentimental 22.9.16, 11.2.17, Peter Pears Recital Room, Snape, Suffolk, UK: Andrew Watts/Ian Burnside/dir. Nicholas Broadhurst

Horn Concerto 3.10.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Richard Watkins/ Kensington Symphony Orchestra/ Russell Keable

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

...through the glass 21.10.16, Royal College of Music, London, UK: Royal College of Music/ Thomas Zehetmair

Voices of the Air World premiere 26.11.16, St Luke’s Church, Battersea, London, UK: Katy Hill/ Festival Chorus/Andrea Brown

It Rains*/Fuga *World premiere 21.3.17, Wigmore Hall, London, UK: Roderick Williams/Nash Ensemble/ Martyn Brabbins

Figures, suspended World premiere 1.4.17, Barbirolli Oboe Competition, Villa Marina, Douglas, Isle of Man

String Quartet No. 5 26.4.17, Park Lane Group Series, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Solem Quartet

Three Interludes 27.4.17, Park Lane Group Series, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Jacquin Trio

new work World premiere 10.6.17, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK: Claire Booth/Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Ryan Wigglesworth

Arrangements Ravel – La vallée des cloches* and Oiseaux tristes from Miroirs *World premiere 13.1.17, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Nicholas Collon

Mahler – Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen World premiere 9.4.17, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland: Ian Bostridge/Musikkollegium Winterthur

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George Benjamin Selected forthcoming performances

George Benjamin Revisiting ‘Viola, Viola’

Octet 10.9.16, Klangspuren Festival, Innsbruck, Austria: Ensemble Modern Meisterkurs

Viola, Viola 24, 25.9.16, Powell Hall, St Louis, MO, USA: Members of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra

A Mind of Winter 25-26.9.16, Grosses Haus, Oldenburgisches Staatstheater, Oldenburg, Germany: Sarah Tuttle/ Oldenburgisches Staatsorchester/ Hendrik Vestmann

Dream of the Song French premiere 28-29.9.16, Festival d’Automne, Philharmonie, Paris, France: Bejun Mehta/SWR Vokalensemble/ Orchestre de Paris/Daniel Harding German premiere 14-15.1.17, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Germany: Bejun Mehta/ Rundfunkchor Leipzig/Dresdner Philharmoniker/Michael Sanderling 9-11.2.17, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, USA; 2.3.17, Carnegie Hall, New York City, NY, USA: Bejun Mehta/ Lorelei Ensemble/Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons 15,17.3.17, Philharmonie, Gasteig, Munich, Germany: Andrew Watts/ Frauenchor des Philharmonischen Chores München/Munich Philharmonic Orchestra/Kent Nagano

At First Light 3.10.16, Sejong Center, Seoul, South Korea: Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra/Antony Hermus

Written on Skin Italian premiere 5, 7.10.16, Konzerthaus, Teatro Comunale, Bolzano, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy: Orchestra Sinfonica Haydn/cond. Rossen Gergov/dir.

Nicola Raab Argentina premiere 14-23.10.16, Sala Alberto Ginastera, Teatro Argentino, La Plata, Argentina: Teatro Argentino/cond. Pablo Druker/ dir. Cristian Drut 13-30.1.17, Royal Opera House, London, UK: The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/cond. George Benjamin/dir. Katie Mitchell

Shadowlines 4.11.16, Badenweiler Musiktage, Badenweiler, Germany: Gilles Vonsattel

Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra 7.11.16, Comédie de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland: Lemanic Modern Ensemble/William Blank 17.3.17, Philharmonie, Paris, France: Ensemble Intercontemporain (1st Invention only) 17, 19.3.17, Rudolf-Oetker-Halle, Bielefeld, Germany: Bielefelder Philharmoniker/Alexander Kalajdžic

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‘Dream of the Song’ Less than a year since its premiere in Amsterdam, George Benjamin’s 20-minute song cycle for countertenor, female chorus and orchestra has already received criticallyacclaimed performances in London as part of a two-day festival at the Barbican, and at the Tanglewood Music Festival. A full score is now on sale (see p.28).

Forthcoming performances include the work’s French Premiere at the Festival d’Automne in September (Orchestre de Paris/Daniel Harding), the German premiere in January (Dresdner Philharmoniker/Michael Sanderling), and a further four US performances – including the New York Premiere at Carnegie Hall in March – where countertenor Bejun Mehta will be joined by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons.

‘Unmistakably a major, profoundly beautiful work.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 20 March 2016

‘A triumph of fine-grained precision.’

The Independent (Michael Church), 20 March 2016

‘The precisely imagined writing for orchestra is a marvel of cool sensuality.’

Boston Globe (Jeremy Eichler), 26 July 2016

An operatic masterpiece travels In March the Mahler Chamber Orchestra presented five concert performances of Written on Skin across Europe.

Conducted by Benjamin, semi-staged by Ben Davis, and featuring many members of the original cast, these performances left many hailing the work as a masterpiece.

‘If Written on Skin doesn’t end up a modern classic, I’ll eat my hat… Every sonority, every flicker, every word registers with electric clarity and force… A large audience sat totally rapt: yes, I am confident we can hail a masterpiece.’

The Telegraph (Rupert Christiansen), 20 March 2016

In October, the opera will be staged in Italy and Argentina, before a revival at London’s Royal Opera House in January.

PHOTO: GEORGE BENJAMIN CONDUCTING THE ROYAL CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA © AGNETE SCHLICHTKRULL

Next performed in September by members of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin’s string duo Viola, Viola sees the composer at his most ingenious and immediate.

Entwined together in ten enthralling minutes of furious close-knit dialogue, two violas conjure an almost orchestral variety and depth of sound, in polyphonic textures that – at their most complex – maintain four or more parts for sustained periods. This surging, dancing drama is one of the most important additions to the viola repertoire since the Ligeti Sonata and Grisey’s Prologue, unleashing the dazzling and explosive potential of an instrument more accustomed to being a melancholy voice hidden in the shadows. Beloved by many of the world’s leading viola players, the work would make an exciting pairing with one of the Mozart String Quintets.

‘A virtuoso tour de force… a visceral dialectic, powered by nervous energy.’

The Times (Helen Wallace), 21 October 1998

A New Recording of ‘Palimpsests’ With its myriad musics constantly colliding and combining, a work as richly layered as Palimpsests almost demands multiple recordings. Now, to complement Ensemble Modern’s vivid account on Nimbus, comes a new recording from the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (also conducted by the composer).

From the intricate grisaille of wire-brushed side drums that acts as a discreet backdrop to much of the work’s drama, to the breathless closing minutes, where piccolos and cowbell are pitted against dizzying volleys of brass, this 2012 NEOS recording from Munich’s Musica Viva brilliantly captures the score’s many intricate details, further enriching our understanding of this masterpiece. …and

a dazzling companion piece

Scored for the same wind-heavy ensemble as Palimpsests (with the addition of a cor anglais), Benjamin’s ingenious transcription of Nicolas De Grigny’s Récit de Tierce en Taille makes an ideal pairing with his own work. Both the spirit and the unusual flavour of this jewel of Baroque organ music are brilliantly captured as Benjamin, inspired by De Grigny’s idiosyncratic registrations, frequently ‘illuminates’ the work’s central melody with parallel harmonics which constantly change in both depth and timbre.

‘It took something already pungently ornate and highly coloured and made it even more so, evoking the richly coloured stops of a French Baroque organ without ever stooping to imitation.’

The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 27 July 2004

George Benjamin celebrates his 60th birthday in 2020. If you are interested in marking this occasion and would like to find out more, please contact promotion@fabermusic.com

TUNING IN

Tom Coult …towards

an opera

Coult has been awarded a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship by Aldeburgh Music to develop a chamber opera in collaboration with the award-winning young playwright Alice Birch. Aldeburgh will provide the pair with two years of support in the form of bursaries, workshops, mentoring and showcases as they develop their project, which will be based on Edgar Allan Poe’s satirical short story The Devil in the Belfry. Birch’s recent work includes Ophelia’s Zimmer, a co-production between London’s Royal Court Theatre and the Schaubühne Theater Berlin directed by Katie Mitchell. Revolt.

She Said. Revolt Again, her 2014 play for The Royal Shakespeare Company, was described by The Guardian as ‘kaleidoscopic, unruly, searing and sharply funny’.

‘Spirit of the Staircase’ The French concept of l’esprit de l’escalier – that perfect retort or remark only formulated after the event – lends its name to Tom Coult’s Spirit of the Staircase for 15 players which was premiered in June by the London Sinfonietta under Martyn Brabbins. A multitude of brilliantly imagined situations are crammed into its 16-minutes, from raucous tutti passages to a subdued melody for the diaphanous mixture of bass flute harmonics and muted viola. Elsewhere, limping celesta and whirring percussion eerily evoke the winding down of a music box. A trombone is another key protagonist, and luminous chords from the ensemble’s assortment of keyboards and tuned percussion repeatedly interrupt with moments of stasis.

‘An insouciant musical game… Coult soon proved he’s very much his own man, conjuring amusing dialogues from simple scale-like figures… Funny and surreal and delicately poetic, all at once.’

The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 2 June 2016

‘The work juxtaposed rapidly moving chains of glistening pitches with moments of stillness, and is full of bewitching sounds. The scheme was worked out with impressive assurance; everything was fresh, precisely imagined and made full use of what the Sinfonietta can do at its best.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 3 June 2016

‘Impressive individuality’ ‘The rapidly emerging British composer left a strong impression. Alternating rapid “stairways” of fast notes, zipping up and down, with passages of near inaction, this had impressive individuality.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 5 June 2016

‘Coult’s witty, light-fingered Spirit of the Staircase was just as inventive instrumentally, but a lot more recognisably structured and frankly more fun. Still in his twenties, he’s a name to watch.’

Psappha commission mixed sextet

George Benjamin Selected forthcoming performances (cont.)

Antara 3.3.17, Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, York, UK: Chimera Ensemble/John Stringer

Upon Silence 19.5.17, Église des Billettes, Paris, France: Emilie Renard/SIT FAST

Dance Figures 1.6.17, Auditorium, Maison de la Radio, Paris, France: Orchestre National de France/David Robertson

Arrangements Bach – Canon & Fugue from The Art of Fugue 10.9.16, Hong Kong City Hall, Hong Kong, China: Hong Kong Sinfonietta/ Alessandro Crudele

Tom Coult Selected forthcoming performances Limp

Having previously performed Coult’s whimsical Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux on two separate occasions, Manchester’s specialist new music ensemble Psappha has commissioned a new work from him for its 25th anniversary season. Supported by the Britten-Pears Foundation and the Ernst von Siemens Muzikstiftung, the multi-movement piece (which will be around 15 minutes long and scored for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and cello) will be premiered in Manchester in February.

20.10.16, Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK: Darragh Morgan/ Mary Dullea

new work for 6 players 16.2.17, St. Michael’s, Ancoats, Manchester, UK: Psappha

An ear-catching new orchestral work In April, Coult’s 10-minute orchestral work Sonnet Machine was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic and Andrew Gourlay. It also featured as incidental music to a Shakespeare-inspired radio play by Tom Wells on Radio 3.

‘Coult’s ear-catching Sonnet Machine paid homage to the rhyme schemes of Elizabethan sonnets by constantly shuffling varied textures, egged on by a slapstick’s whipcrack.’

The Times (Geoff Brown), 26 April 2016

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.’ Whipcracks articulate the work’s 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 openstring sonorities of the work’s arresting point of departure.

Later, the glint of open strings returns to initiate a breathless coda which hurtles forward to its close.

The Times (Richard Morrison), 3 June 2016 PHOTO: TOM COULT © MAURICE FOXALL

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Jonathan Harvey Selected forthcoming performances Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco/The Annunciation/Other Presences/Forms of Emptiness/How could the soul not take flight 23.9.16, LSO St Luke’s, London, UK: Marco Blaauw/BBC Singers/Martyn Brabbins/Sound Intermedia

Song of June 1.10.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Tenebrae/Nigel Short

Clarinet Trio 12.11.16, Milano Musica, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy: Marco Danesi/Daniele Richiedei/ Paolo Gorini

The Annunciation 10.12.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: The Gesualdo Six/ Owain Park

Song of June 1.10.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: Tenebrae/Nigel Short

Lauds 17.12.16, Kings Place, London, UK: Oliver Coates/Tenebrae/Nigel Short

Ricercare una melodia (cello)

Jonathan Harvey An important new study ‘Following performances at Cologne’s Acht Brücken in May (where the festival theme was ‘music and faith’, Jonathan Harvey’s work will be featured strongly at Munich’s Musica Viva in 2017. In July The Arditti Quartet will be on hand to perform all four of Harvey’s string quartets, whilst Matthias Pintscher will conduct the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in ...towards a Pure Land, the extraordinarily colourful and refined orchestral work from 2005.

This latter work, now one of Harvey’s most performed pieces, has also lent its name to a substantial new Germanlanguage study of Harvey’s work by musicologist Suzanne Josek. Subtitled ‘stations on a compositional journey’, this important addition to the Harvey bibliography (published

by Schott) not only contains insightful analysis but also quotes extensively from a series of fascinating interviews with the composer made shortly before his death in 2012.

‘This captivating book is the first comprehensive study of Harvey’s oeuvre. Undoubtedly it is an unavoidable reference point for all those who remain, that are to deal with it. It would therefore be desirable that the book soon appear in other languages.’

Ausgabe der Neuen Zeitschrift für Musik

6.5.17, Kings Place, London, UK: Tim Gill/Rolf Hind

(Leopoldo Siano), April 2016

...towards a pure land

‘Other Presences’

7.7.17, Herkulessaal, Residenz, Munich, Bavaria, Germany: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Matthias Pintscher

Whilst Jonathan Harvey was a composer who always embraced and sought-out the very latest in musical technologies, the simplicity of the a cappella choir became something of a constant to which he returned throughout his life. In late September the BBC Singers will present a concert surveying the whole breadth of this choral output, from the rapt simplicity of his anthem I Love the Lord to the exotic and elaborate textures of Forms of Emptiness and How could the soul not take flight, the latter works finding an inspired pairing in Britten’s virtuosic cantata A.M.D.G.

Malcolm Arnold Selected forthcoming performances Concerto for Two Violins and String Orchestra 10.9.16, Pauluszentrum , Lauffen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany: Junges Kammerorchester/Thomas Conrad

The Song of Simeon 15.10.16, Malcolm Arnold Festival, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, UK: Cambridgeshire Symphony Orchestra/Steve Bingham/Simon Toyne

Symphonic Study ‘Machines’ 15.10.16, Malcolm Arnold Festival, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, UK: Northampton Symphony Orchestra/John Gibbons

Conducted by Martyn Brabbins, who oversaw many Harvey premieres, including that of his last opera Wagner Dream, the concert also includes the iconic Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco alongside a performance of Harvey’s Other Presences by trumpeter Marco Blaauw. Composed for Markus Stockhausen in 2006, this radiant 10-minute work for solo instrument and electronics was the result of a commission from the Cheltenham Festival. In it, trumpet melodies – inspired by Tibetan open-air ceremonial music which Harvey witnessed on a visit to monasteries at and near Rajpur – are looped and harmonised in real time, giving the impression, in the composer’s words, that ‘the trumpet is multiplied and becomes present invisibly at other points in space.’

Symphony No. 6 16.10.16, Malcolm Arnold Festival, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, UK: BBC Concert Orchestra/John Gibbons

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Malcolm Arnold

Full and up-to-date details of the electronic requirements for Harvey’s works can be found online at jonathanharveysoundsources.com PHOTO: MALCOLM ARNOLD

2016 Arnold Festival Entitled ‘The Voice of the People’, the 11th annual Malcolm Arnold Festival takes place from 15-16 October at Northampton’s Royal and Derngate. ‘Our theme this year perfectly sums up Sir Malcolm’s intentions as a composer,’ writes the festival’s Artistic Director Paul Harris. ‘He was always determined to write music that could be immediately appreciated and, although he embraced many 20th-Century ‘’-isms’’, his music remains utterly accessible.’

The festival opens in style with a concert by the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra which will include the first ever performance of the prelude to the unfinished opera Henri Christophe as well as Arnold’s all-too-neglected The Song of Simeon, a Nativity Masque for mimers, soloists, SATB chorus and orchestra. Combining song and dance, as well as some spoken parts, this thrilling 30-minute work to a text by Christopher Hassall shows Arnold at his most imaginative and inspired, in music overflowing with emotion, humour, serenity and grandeur.

Another festival highlight is sure to be a performance of Arnold’s troubled Sixth Symphony by the BBC Concert Orchestra under John Gibbons, who will also conduct the Northampton Symphony Orchestra in Arnold’s Symphony Study ‘Machines’ for brass, percussion and strings. The weekend also sees the culmination of trumpeter John Wallace’s ‘Arnold Fantasies’ project, which will see performances of the Fantasies for brass instruments as well as the Brass Quintet, with four young winners of a nationwide competition. Wallace will also be launching his new recording of Arnold’s complete music for brass.

Fantasy for Guitar With his extensive series of Fantasies for solo instruments, Arnold made an invaluable contribution to the repertoire of recitalists, crafting short, approachable pieces that continue to be programmed internationally. The everpopular Fantasy for Guitar, composed in 1971 for Julian Bream, has recently enjoyed the advocacy of the brilliant YCAT artist Sean Shibe, who performs the enthralling 10-minute work throughout the 16/17 season.

TUNING IN

Torsten Rasch

John Woolrich

Alchemical melodies

‘An ingenious Jesting with Art’

In April, Torsten Rasch’s dramatic Violin Concerto ‘Tropi’ was premiered by Wolfgang Hentrich and the Dresden Philharmonic under Leo McFall. The substantial four movement work – the composer’s first concerto – was inspired by Helmut Krausser ‘s captivating 1993 novel Melodien, in which myth, magic, music, and madness are interact in a dark, and increasingly disturbing, narrative.

John Woolrich’s long association with the Britten Sinfonia goes back more than 15 years - first as the orchestra’s Composer-in-Association and now as one of its artistic advisers. Having previously arranged a number of Dominico Scarlatti sonatas for them to perform with percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, Woolrich has now arranged three more for a chamber ensemble of 10 players.

Scarlatti described his numerous keyboard sonatas as ‘an ingenious Jesting with Art’, and Woolrich’s characterful, pungent, transcriptions of K433, K37 and K199 communicate this playful spirit with aplomb.

Unfolding over 20 minutes, this weighty statement is everything we have come to expect from Rasch: a large orchestra is masterfully handled with an incredible lightness of touch, whist the hefty solo part, with its many knotty twists and turns, offers violinists numerous opportunities to showcase their technical – and interpretative – virtuosity. From the first movement, ‘Descent’, which begins with the violin suspended high in the stratosphere, to the second movement, where much of the constantly renewing material derives from the ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ chant, Rasch’s concerto traces an uncompromising and utterly personal trajectory, which only becomes more intense as it progresses. The finale, ‘Ascent’, reaches its culmination with a quotation of the Easter Hymn ‘Salve festa dies’ but concludes, not with a feeling of release, but rather one of the concerto travelling full circle – back to the allusive high writing with which it began. One of the composer’s most compelling orchestral works to date, the concerto receives its US premiere in September, with Phillippe Quint and the Spokane Symphony Orchestra under Eckhart Preu.

Mendelssohn reframed Was bedeutet die Bewegung…, Rasch’s transcription of a Mendelssohn song cycle for baritone and strings received its US premiere at the Yellow Barn Festival in July. This is no workaday transcription: in addition to skilfully arranging Mendelssohn’s song accompaniments for strings, Rasch has created a number of interludes to link the songs together. These interludes, written in Rasch’s own post-Romantic voice and containing modern techniques including glissandi and snap-pizzicati, add a whole new dimension to the cycle, startlingly revealing its dark undercurrents and psychologies.

‘Swan Song’ An exquisite, softly-spoken tribute to Jackie and Stephen Newbould, the departing heads of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Woolrich’s Swan Song was premiered in June as part of a concert entitled ‘Remembering the Future’. Alto flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello each take up their own halting fragments of song, and the 8-minute piece is built out of their broken melodies, repeatedly punctuated by pregnant silences.

Woolrich and the viola Woolrich’s masterful reworking of Monteverdi for viola and strings, Ulysses Awakes, continues to travel the world.

The composer’s affinity and understanding of this shadowy instrument has resulted in many works built around it – from the recent To the Silver Bow, for viola, double bass and strings, to meticulously imagined chamber works, including Envoi for viola and small ensemble and the fugitive clarinet trio A Farewell. His most extended love letter to the instrument is his 1993 Viola Concerto.

John Woolrich Selected forthcoming performances In the Mirrors of Asleep 1-2.10.16, First Church in Boston, Boston, MA, USA: Chameleon Ensemble

Ulysses Awakes 16.11.16, Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK: 12 ensemble 21.1.17, Hall 1, Kings Place, London, UK: Lawrence Power/English Chamber Orchestra

Scarlatti - Sonatas 3.2.17, Milton Court, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London; 4.2.17, Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, UK: Mahan Esfahani/Britten Sinfonia

Torsten Rasch Selected forthcoming performances Violin Concerto US premiere 17-18.9.16, Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox, Spokane, WA, USA: Philippe Quint/Spokane Symphony/ Eckart Preu

Like Ulysses Awakes, this brooding 20-minute work revisits music of the past, unfolding as a cycle of seven melancholy songs-without-words. The viola sings earthily, whist the orchestra echoes it in predominantly soft and muted colours : flute, harp and tolling gongs. The last song comes from Monteverdi’s madrigal O sia tranquillo il mare: ‘Whether the sea is calm or rough I will wait for you to return’. The singer’s laments are carried away on the winds, and the music resolves into a slow, dark rocking.

PHOTOS: TORSTEN RASCH © MAURICE FOXALL; JOHN WOOLRICH AT THE PREMIERE OF HIS ‘SWAN SONG’ WITH ZOË MARTLEW, JACKIE NEWBOULD, LUKE BEDFORD, RICHARD BAKER AND STEPHEN NEWBOULD © ROBERT DAY

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Oliver Knussen Selected forthcoming performances Songs without Voices 16.9.16, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany: Notabu ensemble neue Musik 15.10.16, Wigmore Hall, London, UK: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Geoffrey Paterson

Flourish with Fireworks 6-7.10.16, Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes, Valladolid, Spain: Orquesta sinfonica de Castilla y León/Andrew Gourlay 10-13.11.16, Atlanta Symphony Hall, Atlanta; Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw; Atlanta Symphony Hall, Atlanta; Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA: Atlanta Symphony Orchestra/ Robert Spano

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

Where the Wild Things Are

Oliver Knussen The Queen’s Medal for Music On 20 May Oliver Knussen CBE was presented with the Queen’s Medal for Music 2015, in a private audience with The Queen. The presentation comes only a day after Knussen received the Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music. The Queen’s Medal for Music, established in 2005, is awarded to an outstanding individual or group of musicians who have had a major influence on the musical life of the nation. Knussen is the eleventh recipient of the award, following the conductor Simon Halsey CBE (the consultant editor for Faber Music’s Choral Series) who received the Medal last year.

Commenting on the award, the Master of The Queen’s Music Judith Weir said: ‘Greatly admired and much loved by his musical colleagues, Knussen is both a revelatory conductor and a masterly composer, whose work always persuades audiences to listen carefully. With characteristic generosity and warmth, he has supported the practice of music in numerous ways: as a musical director of leading festivals, orchestras and ensembles; and as an informal adviser, teacher and friend to several generations of musicians in the UK and further afield.’

Stockholm Portrait Concerts In November the music of Knussen will be the subject of the prestigious Stockholm International Composer Festival, with an impressive 16 works performed over four days.

Ophelia Dances Book 1

Knussen himself will conduct The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in a programme that includes the Third Symphony and his Violin and Horn Concertos, whilst Ryan Wigglesworth and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra are joined by Claire Booth for performances of Songs and a Sea Interlude and the Whitman Settings.

Christian Karlsen and members of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic present Knussen’s Ophelia Dances and Requiem alongside a selection of his chamber pieces.

25.11.16, Wigmore Hall, London, UK: Ensemble Modern/Jonathan Berman

Horn Concerto continues to delight

Flourish with Fireworks/The Way to Castle Yonder/ Violin Concerto/ Music for a Puppet Court/Symphony No 3

‘More concert aria than concerto’ is how Knussen once described his Horn Concerto, which, as well as featuring in the Stockholm festival dedicated to his work, will be performed in May 2017 by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and their principal horn Felix Dervaux under conductor Ryan Wigglesworth.

Brazilian premiere 8-16.10.16, Teatro São Pedro, São Paulo, Brazil: cond. André Dos Santos/dir. Marcelo Gama

‘Where The Wild Things Are’ in Brazil

Requiem 21.10.16, Kanazawa, Japan: Claire Booth/Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa/Oliver Knussen

24, 26.11.16, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden: Clio Gould/ Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Oliver Knussen

Whitman Settings/ Two Organa/Songs and A Sea Interlude/ The Wild Rumpus 25.11.16, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden: Claire Booth/Norrköpings Symfoniorkester/Ryan Wigglesworth

Ophelia Dances Book 1/Ophelia’s Last Dance/Hums and Songs of Winnie-the-Pooh/ Whitman Settings/ Songs without Voices/Sonya’s Lullaby/Requiem 27.11.16, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden: Claire Booth/Stefan Lindgren/Ryan Wigglesworth/Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/ Christian Karlsen

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Where the Wild Things Are, the enchanting first part of Knussen’s double bill of fantasy operas written with Maurice Sendak, receives its Brazilian premiere in October, with six performances at the Teatro São Pedro, São Paulo.

The opera tells the story of Max, a boy yearning for adventure, who runs away from home and sails to an island filled with creatures that take him in as their king.

Marinated in French and Russian opera, and containing allusions to Debussy’s La boîte à joujoux and the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the 40-minute work peaks in a boisterous ‘danse générale’ (à la Borodin or Ravel) as Max and the Wild Things dance the Wild Rumpus (a dazzling 4-minute orchestral gem that also exists as a stand-alone concert work).

Composed for the legendary Barry Tuckwell, Knussen’s 13-minute concerto was originally envisaged in two parts, ‘Fantastico’ (a sonata-allegro) and ‘Adagio’ (variations on a ground bass), framed and connected by cadenza-like passages. In the process of composition, however, these designs telescoped unexpectedly, resulting in a single movement in which the interlocked old forms are only the vestigial frames for a rich exploration of the horn’s many characters, from Mahlerian Nachtmusik to moments of clear, Mozartian brilliance.

Described as ‘a masterpiece of lucidity’ by the Guardian the concerto has received over 80 performances since its premiere in 1994.

Many Knussen scores, including several manuscripts, can be viewed on the Faber Music Online Score Library: scorelibrary.fabermusic.com

PHOTO: QUEEN ELIZABETH II PRESENTS OLIVER KNUSSEN WITH THE QUEEN’S MEDAL FOR MUSIC © STEVE PARSONS

TUNING IN

Julian Anderson

Peter Sculthorpe

Oliver Knussen Selected forthcoming performances (cont.)

Cantata 8.2.17, Wigmore Hall, London, UK: Britten Sinfonia

Horn Concerto 11-12.5.17, Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Felix Dervaux/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Ryan Wigglesworth

Julian Anderson Selected forthcoming performances Alhambra Fantasy

University of Chicago residency

Celebrating Beethoven at 250

Julian Anderson has been appointed Composer-inResidence at the Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago for 2016-17, a position which involves a mixture of private teaching and lectures.

In November, The University of Chicago New Music Ensemble will present a programme of Anderson’s chamber works, including his Prayer for solo viola and The Bearded Lady, the ever-popular duo (for piano with either clarinet or oboe doubling cor anglais) inspired by the character of Baba the Turk from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.

The music of Beethoven long held a special place in the creative imagination of Peter Sculthorpe. As early as his 1954 Piano Sonatina (composed when he was in his mid20s) the main musical idea of the last movement, a Rondo, is a deliberate parody of the theme from the Rondo of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Elsewhere, Sculthorpe invoked the ‘Muss es sein?’ motif from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135 in his numerous Quamby works.

In other news, Anderson won the 2016 RPS Award for Chamber-Scale Composition for his Van Gogh Blue (published by Schott). This is Anderson’s second RPS award to date, following the Large-Scale Composition Award for his Book of Hours for ensemble and electronics back in 2005.

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners In September the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra under Courtney Lewis open their 16/17 season with three performances of Anderson’s Imagin’d Corners – an inventive and colourful 12-minute work designed to showcase the orchestral horn section.

In this thrilling piece the idea of space – explored tentatively by Anderson in several earlier pieces, like the brief offstage horn fanfares at the end of Diptych – here it becomes a key element. Whilst one of the orchestral horns is seated at the rear of the stage throughout (dialoguing with the other horns and also blending with the orchestra), the other four players are mobile. They open the work offstage until, following a long, slowly accelerating interlude, they appear at the centre of the platform, where their cors de chasse character comes to the fore. In a final climax, the horns move to the corners of the stage bellowing wild alphorn-style calls and cries to each other against a jangling orchestral tumult.

The culmination of Sculthorpe’s fascination with this titanic musical figure – and the perfect contemporary work to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020 – is his Beethoven Variations for orchestra (2003 rev. 2006). Based upon the ‘Ode to Joy’ melody from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the work unfolds in four movements.The first, mostly scored for strings, presents statements and extensions of the Beethoven melody and closes with sounds of seagulls which Sculthorpe hoped would recall the coastal waters traversed by Beethoven’s near-contemporary Captain Cook. The second movement, Colonial Dance, is a spirited minor-key variation. Each movement builds progressively towards the finale – with the brass only being introduced in the proceeding Chorale. In the fourth movement, entitled Colonial Song, Beethoven’s melody assumes yet another new guise, before returning in a more recognisable form for the work’s conclusion.

‘The writing is characteristically polished. Whether in the tranquil opening that sounded the essence of pastoral calm, or in downward rushing string glissandi, Sculthorpe’s piece seems destined for a secure place in the repertoire.’

The West Australian (Neville Cohn), 24 November 2003

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

PHOTOS: JULIAN ANDERSON WITH HIS 2016 RPS AWARD FOR CHAMBER-SCALE COMPOSITION © SIMON JAY PRICE PETER SCULTHORPE ©MAURICE FOXALL

1.9.16, Stormen Concert House, Norway: Nordnorsk Opera og Symfoniorkester/cond. Timothy Weiss

Imagin’d Corners 30.9-2.10.16, Jacoby Symphony Hall, Jacksonville, FL, USA: Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra/ Courtney Lewis

The Bearded Lady 22.10.16, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, Scotland, UK: Mark Simpson/Richard Uttley

The Bearded Lady/ Prayer/Piano Etudes 6.11.16, Fulton Hall, University of Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago New Music Ensemble

The Discovery of Heaven Irish premiere 14.2.17, National Concert Hall, Dublin, Ireland: RTE National Symphony Orchestra/Gavin Maloney

Peter Sculthorpe Selected forthcoming performances Djilile 2-16.9.16, touring 7 venues across New South Wales, Australia: Australian Chamber Orchestra/Meta4

Earth Cry 7.9.16, Vodafone Events Centre, Manukau, Australia: Manukau City Symphony Orchestra/Uwe Grodd 8.10.16, QSO Studio South Bank, Brisbane, QLD, Australia: Queensland Symphony Orchestra/Brett Kelly

Irkanda I 12.9.16, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, NSW; 13.9.16, Llewellyn Hall, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia; 15.11.16, Milton Court, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, UK: Richard Tognetti

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Thomas Adès Selected forthcoming performances

Thomas Adès ‘Arcadiana’ Composed in 1994, Adès’s first string quartet Arcadiana is now firmly established as part of the contemporary string quartet repertoire, a fact backed up by the ever increasing number of recordings. Two new interpretations from the Danish and Varèse Quartets take the total number to seven – a number only rivalled by the likes of Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit and the Ligeti quartets.

Totentanz 18.9.16, Grosse Saal, Laeiszhalle, Hamburg, Germany: Hamburg Symphony Orchestra/Jeffrey Tate 3-5.11.16, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, USA: Christianne Stotijn/Mark Stone/Boston Symphony Orchestra/ Thomas Adès

Violin Concerto

‘The Danish players sound terrific – able to capture the picturesque watery shimmer but also the slime and murk below the surface.’

29.9.16, Peel Hall, University of Salford, UK: Daniel Pioro/BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Gourlay

The Guardian (Kate Molleson), 21 April 2016

26-27.1.17, Gewandhaus, Leipzig, Germany: Anthony Marwood/ Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/ Andrew Manze

A new version of ‘Lieux retrouvés’

Asyla 10.10.16, Rosegarten, Mannheim, Germany: Orchester des Nationaltheaters Mannheim/ Alexander Soddy 26.10.16, Teatro dell’Opera, Rome, Italy: Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma/ Paul Daniel

Chamber Symphony 8.12.16, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh; 9.12.16, City Halls, Glasgow, Scotland, UK: Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati

Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face French premiere of duo version 12.12.16, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France: Thomas Adès/Kirill Gerstein UK premiere of duo version 20.3.17, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, UK: Anderson and Roe

Powder Her Face 27-29.1.17, Lyric Theatre, Belfast, Ireland: Northern Ireland Opera/ cond. Jan Latham-Koenig/dir. Antony McDonald 19.3-6.7.17, Theater Aachen, Germany: Theater Aachen/ Sinfonieorchester Aachen/cond.

Justus Thorau/dir. Ludger Engels

In Seven Days 1.2.17, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK: Rolf Hind/ London Sinfonietta/cond. TBA

Lieux retrouvés/ Totentanz US premiere of Lieux orchestration 10-11.2.17, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA, USA: Steven Isserlis/Simon Keenlyside/ Christianne Stotijn/LA Philharmonic Orchestra/Thomas Adès

The Exterminating Angel UK premiere 24.4-13.5.17, Royal Opera House, London, UK: Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/cond. Thomas Adès/ dir. Tom Cairns

Boston residency The Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons have announced the appointment of Thomas Adès as the orchestra’s first-ever Artistic Partner for a three-year period starting in the autumn of 2016. Adès will assume his new position with a performance of his monumental and critically acclaimed Totentanz, for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra with soloists Christianne Stotijn and Mark Stone. In what is sure to be a highlight of the recital offerings in Boston in 2016-17, Adès will join frequent collaborator, tenor Ian Bostridge, for a performance of Schubert’s Winterreise. In the 2018-19 Season, the BSO will present the highly anticipated world premiere of Adès’s BSO-commissioned Piano Concerto, with Kirill Gerstein as soloist.

In addition to his work with the BSO at Symphony Hall, Adès will also play a prominent role at Tanglewood, where he will be the Director of the Festival of Contemporary Music in 2018 and 2019.

Two more dances for Berlin Having performed Adès’s Asyla in his first concert as Music Director of the Berlin Philharmoniker, and then premiering Tevot in 2007, Sir Simon Rattle has commissioned an extension to Adès’s Dances from Powder her Face as one of a string of new works to mark the end of his 16-year tenure with the orchestra.

Commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Carnegie Hall, the 17-minute Suite from Powder Her Face will be premiered in May 2017.

Meanwhile, Adès’s precocious chamber opera continues to travel the world. 2017 will see performances in Aachen, Belfast, Brno, Görlitz and Zittau.

The Full Score of Powder her Face (ISBN 0-571-51995-4) is available from fabermusic.com, priced at £100.00 20

PHOTO: THOMAS ADÈS © AGNETE SCHLICHTKRULL

In March, Adès unveiled his exquisite new orchestration of Lieux retrouvés with Steven Isserlis and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. The UK premiere followed in August with the Britten Sinfonia at the BBC Proms. The new version adds a whole new range of colours to the work, from the luminous opening ‘Les eaux’, the knotty canons of the second movement, ‘La Montagne’, ‘Les champs’ with its hushed, stratospheric solo cello lines, and the romping cancan macabre finale.

A US premiere follows in February 2017, when the composer will conduct the LA Philharmonic in a programme that also includes Totentanz.

‘Mercurial and luminous, full of hidden ideas, it conjures water, mountain and field, ending in town with a sardonic, Offenbach-inspired can-can.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 21 August 2016

‘As well as being a concerto, the result might equally be construed as a suite of character pieces, a gentle fluidity marking out the aquatic territory of the first, the cello rising towards a distantly glimpsed peak in the second… Within the urban ruckus of the fourth, the cancan achieved a comicgrotesque and at times ghostly apotheosis.’

The Guardian (George Hall), 16 August 2016

‘Here are half-forgotten places, faint impressions.

Its hazy vision of open fields is a simple figure on the cello that winds softly higher and higher until it disappears into the ether.’

The Financial Times (Richard Fairman), 16 August 2016

LSO Focus In March Adès conducted two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, placing his own music alongside the violin concertos of Sibelius and Brahms (with Christian Tetzlaff and Anne-Sophie Mutter respectively) as well as the Franck Symphony in D minor. The performances of Asyla, Tevot and Polaris will all be released on the LSO Live label.

‘The magnetic Polaris, the touching and revelatory Brahms, and the epic Tevot. All works of richness, heart and fantastic aural bounty.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 13 March 2016

TUNING IN

Martin Suckling

Carl Vine

Thomas Adès Selected forthcoming performances (cont.)

Suite from Powder Her Face World premiere of complete version 31.5-3.6.17, Philharmonie, Berlin, Germany: Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle

Martin Suckling Selected forthcoming performances Piano Concerto World premiere

‘Six Speechless Songs’

Music tailor-made for dance

Taking its title from the final couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet VIII, Martin Suckling’s Six Speechless Songs were written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to mark their 40th anniversary. As part of Suckling’s ongoing role as Associate Composer with the SCO, the pieces were revived in April 2016 with Oliver Knussen conducting.

There seems to a natural synergy between the music of Carl Vine and dance. Since moving to Sydney in 1975, Vine worked as a freelance pianist and composer with a wide variety of ensembles and dance companies and was resident composer at both the Sydney Dance Company and the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. He has written 25 scores for dance to date, including Poppy, a 90-minute work for Graeme Murphy’s celebrated ballet on Jean Cocteau.

‘It feels that every note counts and has its rightful place… Exquisitely orchestrated – from chattering, birdsong in the opener, mournful bells tolling across the orchestra in the fourth piece, to the shrill piping of two piccolos that closes the work – it covers a remarkable range of moods and emotions, intimate and engaging.’

The Artsdesk (David Kettle), 25 April 2016

‘Flutes fizzing into the stratosphere’ Kate Molleson (The Observer), 24 April 2016

US premiere of clarinet trio Unveiled at the 2015 Aldeburgh Festival, then performed in York, Leeds and London as part of a UK tour by the Dark Inventions Ensemble, Suckling’s clarinet trio Visiones (after Goya) received its US premiere from the Locrian Ensemble in August. The catalyst for the 12-minute work was a chilling image from Goya’s ‘Witches and Old Women’ album – three persons, bound together in an uncanny, seemingly weightless, dance. ‘There is a kind of beauty there, I think, and elegance, and poise, and some sweet melancholy,’ remarks Suckling, ‘but also obsession and violence and no way out’.

Piano Concerto As with Six Speechless Songs – and his other SCO commission, storm, rose, tiger which takes its name from Borges – Suckling’s latest work, a Piano Concerto, also draws on literary inspiration, in this case the work of Scottish poet Niall Campbell. The substantial fivemovement work will be premiered in October, with three performances from Tom Poster and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Robin Ticciati.

PHOTO: MARTIN SUCKLING © MAURICE FOXALL; CARL VINE © KEITH SAUNDERS

Vine’s concert works also make ideal material for choreographers. Most recently his Third String Quartet, with its demonic moto perpetuo finale, was presented as part of an evening of chamber ballets by Gareth Belling at Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Queensland.

Commissioned by the Smith Quartet and first performed by them at the 1994 Brighton Arts Festival, this engaging 14-minute work also exists in a version for string orchestra, Smith’s Alchemy, which receives a performance from the National Academy of Music Chamber Orchestra at the Huntington Estate Music Festival in November.

Smith’s Alchemy seeks to transform the individual instruments into a single super instrument while capitalising on their natural singing qualities – a kind of aural alchemy. Vine comments that ‘the potential to “share” difficult techniques across more than one instrument has in many ways liberated the music, allowing greater emphasis on its lyrical qualities.’

A Sixth Quartet Crowning Vine’s substantial body of chamber music are his string quartets, a remarkably rich collection of pieces that span over 45 years of composition.

Having previously premiered Vine’s dark and pensive String Quartet No. 4, the Takács Quartet will premiere his Sixth Quartet Australia as part of Musica Viva tour in August 2017. A US premiere is scheduled at Carnegie Hall (who have co-commissioned the piece together with Musica Viva and The Seattle Commissioning Club).

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

Psalm 29.11.16, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, UK: Guildhall New Music Ensemble/Richard Baker

Flute Concerto World premiere 3.2.17, Usher Hall, Edinburgh; 4.2.17, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Scotland, UK: Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Peter Oundjian/ Katherine Bryan

Carl Vine Selected forthcoming performances Wonders World premiere 22,24.9.16, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia: Penny Mills/Chris Hillier/Sydney Philharmonia Choir & Festival Chorus/Sydney Youth Orchestra/Brett Weymark

Five Hallucinations World premiere 6-8.10.16, Symphony Center, Chicago, USA: Michael Mulcahy/ Chicago Symphony Orchestra/James Gaffigan Australian premiere 5-6.4.17, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia: Michael Mulcahy/Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Mark Wigglesworth

Smith’s Alchemy 25.11.16, Huntington Estate Music Festival, Huntington Estate, Mudgee, Australia: Australian National Academy of Music Chamber Orchestra

String Quartet No.6 World premiere 10-28.8.17, Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia: Takács Quartet (9 performances at venues across Australia as part of a Musica Viva tour)

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NEW WORKS Score and parts for hire Hymn of Echoes (2016) arrangement of ‘Hymn of Echoes’ from the Genesis Project clarinet, piano and string orchestra. Duration c.2 minutes. Commissioned by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta FP: 14.10.16, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Martin Fröst/Amsterdam Sinfonietta Score and parts for hire Incantation (2016) arrangement of ‘Incantation’ from the Genesis Project string orchestra. Duration c.1 minute. Commissioned by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta FP: 14.10.16, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Martin Fröst/Amsterdam Sinfonietta Score and parts for hire

DAVID MATTHEWS A June Song (2016) string orchestra. Duration 5 minutes. FP: recording on 29.8.16, Debrecen, Hungary: Kodaly Philharmonic/Paul Mann Score and parts for hire

ANNA MEREDITH Anno (2016) String orchestra, harpsichord and electronics (to be performed with Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’). Duration 60 minutes.

Commissioned by Scottish Ensemble and Spitalfields Music.

FP: 6.6.16, Spitalfields Festival, Oval Space, London, UK: Scottish Ensemble/Jonathan Morton Score and parts in preparation

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY arr. DAVID MATTHEWS Two Pieces from ‘The Seasons’ (2016) string orchestra. Duration 7 minutes. strings (5.4.4.3.1).

Commissioned by Scottish Ensemble. FP: 5.5.16, Is Sanat Concert Hall, Istanbul, Turkey: Scottish Ensemble.

Score and parts for hire

Stage Works THOMAS ADÈS The Exterminating Angel (2015-16) opera in three acts. Duration 115 minutes. Text: Tom Cairns in collaboration with the composer. Based on the screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza (English) 3(II=picc+bfl.III=picc. afl).3(III=ca).3(III=bcl).3(III=contraforte or cbsn with low A) – 4(optionally doubling Wagner tubas).3.3.1 – timp(and roto toms) – perc(4) Also 4 players offstage playing 8 church bells or bass handbells. And offstage massed drums – 8-10 players (military drums – small portable BD or TD) – pno(6’ grand) – harp – gtr – ondes martenot – strings (12.10.8.6.6) 8 vln (front 2 desks of both sections) also play 1/32 size violins Cast of 22 singers plus chorus LUCIA(S)/LETICIA(High ColS)/LEONORA(M)/SILVIA(S)/BLANCA(M)/BEATRIZ(S)/NOBILE(T)/RAÚL(T)/COLONEL(HighBar)/ FRANCISCO(CT)/EDUARDO(LyricT)/RUSSELL(BBar)/ROC(BBar)/DOCTOR(B)/JULIO(Bar)/LUCAS(T)/ENRIQUE(T)/PABLO(Bar)/ MENI(S)/CAMILLA(M)/PADRE(Bar)/YOLI(BoyTr)/CHORUS Commissioned by the 2016 Salzburg Music Festival, the Royal Opera Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera New York, and the Royal Danish Opera FP: 28.7.16, Haus für Mozart, Salzburg, Austria: Salzburger Bachchor/ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien/dir. Tom Cairns/ cond. Thomas Adès Score, vocal score and parts in preparation

ANNA MEREDITH Tassel (2014) Ballet for electric guitar, drums and electronics. Duration 9 minutes. Commissioned by The Living Earth Show.

FP: 4.8.16, San Francisco, CA, USA: Post:ballet, The Living Earth Show/chor. Robert Dekkers Score and parts in preparation

Orchestra THOMAS ADÈS Lieux retrouvés (2016) cello and small orchestra. Duration 17 minutes. 2(II=picc).1.1.bcl.1.contraforte – 1.1.1.0 – perc(2) – harp – pno(=cel) – strings (4.4.3.1.2). Commissioned by the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Britten Sinfonia.

FP: 23.3.2016, KKL Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland: Steven Isserlis/Luzerner Sinfonieorchester/Thomas Adès.

Score and parts in preparation

FRANCISCO COLL Mural (2015) orchestra. Duration c.24 minutes. 2 picc.2.2.ca.2.bcl.2.2 cbsn – 4.4.2.btrbn.cbtrbn.1 – timp – perc (6) – harp – pno – strings Commissioned by Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg & Philharmonie Luxembourg, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía (Valencia) FP: 23.9.16, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Luxembourg: Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg/Gustavo Gimeno Score and parts in preparation

ANDERS HILLBORG Plainsong and Echoes (2013) soprano saxophone (or oboe) and strings. Duration 8 minutes.

FP: 26.3.15, Eric Ericson Hall, Stockholm, Sweden: Theo Hillborg/Lilla Akademiens Stråkorkester/Mark Tatlow.

Score and parts for hire Genesis Project (2015) clarinet, girls choir and orchestra. Duration 10 minutes. solo cl – solo vln - girls choir - picc.1.2.2(II=bcl).1.cbsn – 2.2.0.0 – pno – strings.

Jointly commissioned by Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, International Chamber Music Festival, Stavanger, Norway, Oslo Philharmonic, and St Paul Chamber Orchestra FP: 3.12.15, Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden: Martin Fröst/Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra

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PHOTO: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL © SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE/MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

CARL VINE Concerto for Orchestra (2014-16) Duration c.20 minutes. picc.2(II=afl).2.ca.2.bcl.2.cbsn - 4.3.2.btrbn.1 - timp - perc(2) - harp – strings.

FP: 10.10.14, Perth Concert Hall, Perth, WA, Australia: West Australian Symphony Orchestra/Michael Stern. Commissioned by Geoff Stearn for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Score and parts for hire Five Hallucinations (2016) trombone and orchestra. Duration c.20 minutes. picc.2(II=afl).2.ca.2.bcl.2.cbcn – 4.3.3.1 – timp – perc(2) – harp - solo trbn – strings. Co-commissioned by the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and

by Kim Williams AM, Geoff Ainsworth & Johanna Featherstone for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

FP: 6.10.16, Symphony Center, Chicago, IL, USA: Michael Mulcahy/Chicago Symphony Orchestra/James Gaffigan.

Score and parts in preparation

Ensemble FRANCISCO COLL Harpsichord Concerto (2016) harpsichord and 14 players. Duration c.10 minutes. 0.0.1(=bcl).cbsn - 0.2.0.0 - perc(1) - solo harpsichord - strings 2.2.2.2.1.

Commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia. FP: 3.2.17 Milton Court, London, UK: Mahan Esfahani/Britten Sinfonia.

Score and parts in preparation

TOM COULT Spirit of the Staircase (2016) ensemble of 15 players. Duration c.16 minutes.

1(=picc+bfl).1.1(=cbcl).cbsn - 1.1.1.0 - perc(1) - pno(=cel) - harp - 1.1.1.1.1.

Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta, with generous support from Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner and an Elliott Carter legacy.

FP: 1.6.16, St John’s Smith Square, London, UK: London Sinfonietta/Martyn Brabbins.

Score and parts for hire

FELIX MENDELSSOHN arr. DAVID MATTHEWS A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture (2016) ensemble of 11 players. Duration 13 minutes. 1.1.1.1 - 1.0.0.0 - pno - 1.1.1.1.1.

FP: 5.3.16, Wigmore Hall, London, UK: Nash Ensemble/Jamie Phillips Score and parts for hire

Vocal FRANCISCO COLL Ceci n’est pas un Concerto (2016) soprano and ensemble of 15 players. Duration c.18 minutes. Text: Francisco Coll (English). 1.1.1.0.cbsn - 1.1.1.0 - perc(2) pno - strings (1.1.1.1.1). Commissioned by the BCMG with financial assistance through their Sound Investment Scheme.

FP: 10.12.16, CBSO Centre Birmingham, UK: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Thomas Adès.

Score and parts in preparation

Chamber FRANCISCO COLL Chanson et Bagatelle (2016) trombone and piano. Duration 7½ minutes Commissioned jointly by BBC Radio 3 and the Royal Philharmonic Society as part of the New Generation Artists Scheme FP: 19.11.16, The Venue, Leeds College of Music, Leeds, UK: Peter Moore/Richard Uttley.

Score and part in preparation

NEW PUBLICATIONS AND RECORDINGS

TANSY DAVIES Arabescos (2002) oboe and piano. Duration 8 minutes Commissioned by Nicholas Daniel.

FP: 6.7.02, Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK: Nicholas Daniel/ Julius Drake.

Score and part on special sale from the Hire Library

DAVID MATTHEWS Sonatina (2016) clarinet, viola and piano. Duration c.10 minutes. the third movement, ‘Chaconne’, was originally written for viola and piano and commissioned by the Ida Carroll Trust. FP: ‘Chaconne’: 7.10.16, Alwyn Festival, Blythburgh Church, Blythburgh, Suffolk, UK: Linda Merrick/Sarah-Jane Bradley/ Nathan Williamson.

Score and parts in preparation

MATTHEW HINDSON Scenes from Romeo & Juliet (2016) Suite for saxophone quartet. Duration 25 minutes. ssax(=asax).asax.tsax.bsax.

Commissioned by Father Arthur Bridge for Ars Musica Australis.

FP: 28.05.16, Glebe Justice Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia: Nexas Quartet Score and parts on special sale from the Hire Library

PETER SCULTHORPE Sonata for Cello and Percussion (2001) cello and percussion. Duration 12 minutes Score and parts on special sale from the Hire Library

Instrumental FRANCISCO COLL

New Publications

New Recordings

JULIAN ANDERSON

THOMAS ADÈS

Fantasias

Full Score 0-571-53884-3

£24.99

GEORGE BENJAMIN Dream of the Song

Full Score 0-571-53887-8

£29.99

ANDERS HILLBORG Mouyayoum

Full Score 0-571-53886-X

£10.99

Arcadiana Danish String Quartet ECM New Series 2453 Quatuor Varèse Nomad Music NMM033

GEORGE BENJAMIN Dream of the Song Bejun Mehta/Nederlands Kamerkoor/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/ George Benjamin RCO Live Horizon RCO16003 Palimpsests Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks/George Benjamin NEOS 11422 Three Miniatures for solo violin Diego Tosi Solstice SOCD318

BENJAMIN BRITTEN Young Apollo Lorenzo Soulès/Aldeburgh Strings/Markus Däunert Linn Records CKD 478D

FRANCISCO COLL Hyperlude IV Jonathan Morton (London Sinfonietta) NMC DL3019

Vestiges (2012)

JONATHAN HARVEY

piano. Duration 9 minutes. FP: 21.11.15 Phipps Hall, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK: Richard Uttley.

Score on special sale from the Hire Library

I love the Lord; Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis; Toccata; Come, Holy Ghost; Praise ye the Lord; Missa Brevis; The royal banners forward go; Laus Deo; The Annunciation St John’s College Choir Cambridge/Andrew Nethsingha Edward Picton-Turbervill (organ) Signum SIGCD456

ANDERS HILLBORG Just a Minute (2016) piano. Duration 1 minute. FP: 20.4.16, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA, USA: Gloria Cheng. Composed in memory of Steven Stucky Score on special sale from the Hire Library

COLIN MATTHEWS Figures, suspended (2016) oboe. Duration c.5 minutes. Commissioned for the 4th Barbirolli International Oboe Festival and Competition by an anonymous donor.

FP: 8.4.17, 4th Barbirolli International Oboe Festival and Competition, Erin Arts Centre, Isle of Man. Score in preparation

DAVID MATTHEWS A Love Song (2016) piano. Duration 3½ minutes. Commissioned as part of William Howard’s Love Song project by Neil King, for Matilda FP: 3.5.16, Leighton House, London, UK: William Howard.

Score in preparation

PETER SCULTHORPE Evocation (1946) piano. Duration 2½ minutes. FP: 27.8.1946, ABC Radio, Australia: Peter Sculthorpe.

Score on special sale from the Hire Library

Choral

Chant Christophe Desjardins Winter and Winter 9102362 Adrien La Marca La Dolce Volta LDV22 Song of June Octopus Chamber Choir/Bart van Reyn Etcetera KTC1529

MATTHEW HINDSON Lament for cello and orchestra (premiere recording) Sue-Ellen Paulsen/Tasmanian SO/Benjamin Northey ABC Classics (available for download)

COLIN MATTHEWS Cello Concerto No. 2; Cortège; Violin Concerto Anssi Karttunen/BBC Symphony Orchestra/Rumon Gamba; Royal Concertgeouw Orchestra/Riccardo Chailly; Leila Josefowicz/BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen NMC D227

DAVID MATTHEWS

TORSTEN RASCH

Piano Quintet Martin Cousin/Villiers Quartet Somm Records SOMMCD 0157

A Foreign Field Psalm (2013)

ANNA MEREDITH

Anthem for a cappella SATB double choir. Duration 5 minutes. Text: Psalm 91 (Latin). ‘A Foreign Field Psalm’ is an alternative setting of the Psalm which appears in Rasch’s ‘A Foreign Field’.

Score in preparation

Varmints Anna Meredith/Gemma Kost/Jack Ross/Sam Wilson/Oliver Coates Moshi Moshi Records/PIAS MOSHICD67

Zeit und Ewigkeit (2016) a capella choir (mixed voices). Duration c.5 minutes. Text: Angelus Silesius ‘Cherubinischer Wandersmann’ (German). FP: 17.6.16, Unerhörtes Mitteldeutschland, Hallescher Dom, Halle an der Saale, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany: Stadtsingechor zu Halle/Clemens Flämig. Commissioned by the Stadtsingechor Halle on the occasion of its 900th anniversary 2016 and was supported by the Arts Trust of Saxony-Anhalt.

Score on special sale from the Hire Library

Scent Opera (premiere recording) Various artists Bedroom Community EP

VALGEIR SIGURÐSSON & NICO MUHLY

23

John Harle: The Saxophone John Harle is one of the world’s leading saxophonists. He has worked with everyone from Michael Nyman and Sir Harrison Birtwistle to Marc Almond and Sir Paul McCartney, and has also popularised the instrument through his work as a respected composer, conductor, producer and teacher. Faber Music is delighted to be publishing his seminal work John Harle: The Saxophone, in which he offers players of all levels an in-depth approach to mastering the instrument.

Every aspect of playing and performing is explored through the work’s two volumes, from breathing, resonant tone production and fluent articulation to techniques for building ease and flow in performance. In addition there are bespoke musical exercises and illuminating graphics, illustrations and photographs designed to inspire every player. Practical, clear and indispensable, The Saxophone unlocks Harle’s secrets to playing with individuality, effortless technique and a powerful musical presence.

‘Harle’s saxophone sound has sailed through the largest concert halls in the world like the voice of a world-class singer – possibly as close as any player has come to the sound of the human voice… John generously reveals all about the saxophone in his book and offers a new direction in playing that will resound through generations to come. It is a work of genius from the genius of the saxophone, and is testimony to this great player’s unique place in the history of his instrument.’

Ashley Stafford - singer and vocal coach

‘This is the most original approach I’ve ever seen – it’s like Einstein’s Grand Unified Theory.’

Ted Hegvik - Master Saxophonist (The Legacy of Rudy Weidoeft)

Two-volume boxed set 0571539619 £40.00 February 2017

Media & Film Synchronisation Keaton Henson

London Symphony Orchestra Faber Music is delighted to have entered into an agreement with LSO Live, under which we represent their extensive catalogue of recordings for worldwide synchronisation licensing. Their catalogue is a treasure trove of great recordings, and the first licence issued on their behalf is for the use of Sir Colin Davis’s recording of Holst’s The Planets in an American documentary film about climate change, How to Let Go Of the World (and Love All The Things Climate Can’t Change).

Jonny Greenwood Keaton Henson’s track ‘La Naissance’ is being used in a film advertising the Burberry brand, to be screened and shown worldwide over the period of a year from August. This is another pleasing example of how well Henson’s music works in an audio-visual context, being one of a series of significant synch licences we have granted for the use since signing him in late 2014.

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PHOTOS: JOHN HARLE © NOBBY CLARK; KEATON HENSON © ANTI

As ever, there continues to be a great demand for synch licences in respect of Jonny Greenwood’s music. Early in 2016 his string orchestra work Popcorn Superhet Receiver was used in a Netflix trailer for the hit US TV show House of Cards. The same work has also been used in an American black and white fantasy drama The Black That Follows.

Another work for strings, his 48 Responses to Polymorphia was licensed for use in the Chilean film Neruda.

EDUCATIONAL, MEDIA AND BOOKS

New Releases from Faber & Faber Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians Revisited by Steven Isserlis Robert Schumann was far ahead of his time, not least in his attitude to children and young people. His music anticipated a multitude of trends that would spread in the 150 years after his death; almost every major composer who followed him acknowledged his influence.

Schumann taught at Mendelssohn’s conservatory in Leipzig, and his Advice for Young Musicians, originally created to accompany his famous Album for the Young, remains as relevant today as when it was written. Celebrated cellist Steven Isserlis adds his own extensive commentary to Schumann’s words of wisdom. The advice is by turns practical, humorous and profound, making this volume a must for aspiring musicians of all ages and standards.

Hardback

9780571330911

£12.99

1 September 2016

Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry you Through Fiona Maddocks Bach or Gershwin, Reich or Chopin? What makes us listen to music? How do we choose?

Can music reflect the key moments in our lives? How and why does a certain piece inspire, comfort or console? Fiona Maddocks, music critic of the Observer, selects more than a hundred classical works, spanning ten thousand years, that have shaped her own listening.

The result is a highly personal treasury of music familiar and rare, ancient and modern, for anyone – expert or newcomer – with curiosity, passion and a readiness to listen.

Hardback

9780571329380

£12.99

6 October 2016

Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life John Adams With a new foreword by the composer A journey through the musical landscape of the life and times of John Adams, one of today’s most admired and frequently performed composers. In Hallelujah Junction, Adams traces his musical lineage back to the era of swing bands and to his grandfather’s New Hampshire dance hall, where his clarinettist father met his jazz-singer mother. He evokes his musical childhood in vivid detail, with its marching bands and small-town orchestras, and describes his gradual evolution into one of the most important figures in American musical culture. Not only a deeply personal memoir, Hallelujah Junction includes cogent, incisive and witty commentaries on events and people ranging from Richard Nixon and Allen Ginsberg to the Beatles, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, John Cage and Frank Zappa.

Paperback

9780571231164

£12.99

3 November 2016

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Varmints: Anna Meredith’s debut album

‘Anno’, Aurora, and Bowie at the Proms

There’s been widespread praise for Anna Meredith’s debut album, ‘Varmints’, out on Moshi Moshi Records/PIAS. It scooped the Scottish Album of the Year Award and has been receiving airplay across the BBC network on Radios 1, 3, 4 and 6. In the US the album was premiered on NPR. Meredith’s band have been touring the album this summer with a host of live shows at major festivals across Europe, including Glastonbury and Latitude. In November they will give a headline show at London’s Scala and feature at the Iceland Airwaves Festival, before going on to tour Germany. ‘[It] positively bristles… Meredith should do this more often.’

The Sunday Times (Dan Cairns), 5 March 2016

‘There’s no such thing as boring in the wonderful world of Meredith… galloping, joyful inventiveness… Visceral, cerebral, utterly lovable.’

Q Magazine (Victoria Segal), May 2016

‘One of the most innovative minds in modern British music.’

Pitchfork (Laura Snapes), 7 March 2016

‘Hearing a leading young classical composer, regardless of gender, leap ahead of the pack to make electronic pop that’s both accessible and out there is something very special.’

The Wire (Katrina Dixon), 1 March 2016

‘Vibrant and kaleidoscopic in a way few musicians could ever muster, [Varmints] provides a jolt of energy and inspiration to both the pop and classical inflections of Meredith’s personality, bridging the two worlds like never before and marking her out as a talent like no other.’

DIY, 4 March 2016

‘…leaves you open-mouthed, ecstatic and wishing that both the charts and the Proms were dominated by Meredith’s music.’

The National (Alan Morrison), 10 March 2016

‘A jaw-dropping debut’ The Line of Best Fit (Grant Rinder), 29 February 2016

A 60-minute immersive work for string orchestra and electronics, Anno combines Meredith’s own newly-commissioned music with extracts from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and video installations by her sister, Eleanor Meredith. It proved to be a highlight of the Spitalfields Festival where it launched with four performances by the Scottish Ensemble at the Oval Space in June and will travel to Scotland in November, with six performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

A new sextet is to be unveiled by members of the Aurora Orchestra in a concert at the Wigmore Hall, London on 24 September. The 10-minute piece has been co-commissioned by The Radcliffe Trust, NMC Recordings, and by Wigmore Hall, with the support of André Hoffmann, president of the Fondation Hoffmann.

One of the undoubted highpoints of the BBC Proms season has been the David Bowie Prom, a late-night event performed by André de Ridder’s Berlin-based s t a r g a z e collective on 29 July.

Meredith was commissioned by the BBC to write two orchestrations for the tribute: Ex Soft-Cell singer Marc Almond performed her arrangements of ‘Starman’ and ‘Life on Mars’.

Sigurðsson premiere at Iceland Airwaves Iceland’s largest pop music festival is to premiere a new commission for cello and orchestra by native composer Valgeir Sigurðsson. The Iceland Airwaves Music Festival is more used to hosting artists such as Kraftwerk, Sigur Rós, and Fatboy Slim, but will stage the first performance of Sigurðsson’s Struck, on 3 November in the iconic Harpa hall. André de Ridder will conduct the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with cellist Bryndís Halla Gylfadóttir.

Meanwhile, Scent Opera is the first release on Bedroom Community’s new HVALREKI digital-series. The 14-minute piece was co-written with Nico Muhly in 2009 for Green Aria: A Scent Opera, ‘an opera for your nose’ by Stewart Matthew and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel and premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Looking ahead, Bedroom Community will also release Sigurðsson’s debut orchestral disc in 2017. It will include the Dowland-inspired No Nights Dark Enough (a co-commission from November Music and Dark Days Music, and the Spitalfields Festival), Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Five (commissioned by the Winnipeg SO), and a re-imagining of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet K 465.

26

PHOTO: IMAGE FROM ‘ANNO’ © ELEANOR MEREDITH

‘The Battle of the Somme’ tour commences The Somme100FILM project began on 1 July, with Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a live performance of Laura Rossi’s score to The Battle of the Somme film, as part of the national commemorative event at Thiepval Memorial, France.

Broadcast live on BBC Television, the remarkable event was attended by world leaders, members of the British Royal Family, servicemen and the public. Live orchestral screenings are now taking place worldwide. On 18 November, (100 years since the battle ended), the BBC Concert Orchestra and John Gibbons perform alongside the film at the Royal Festival Hall, London, whilst overseas performances are planned in France, Ireland, Germany, Canada and New Zealand.

The Imperial War Museum are offering the film hire free of charge for the centenary year (up to July 2017), and Faber Music is offering reduced hire fees. Rossi and specialist film historians can be booked to give pre-concert talks as part of a live screening. There’s also a linked education project with free downloadable resources for secondary schools. The project aims to secure 100 live orchestral screenings, and there are already over 70 confirmed. To find out more visit: somme100film.com

Bermel portrait concerts in Germany

Jon Boden releases post-Bellowhead album

Ex-Bellowhead singer, Jon Boden, has been making solo festival appearances this summer in preparation for a solo 14-date UK tour in November. He’ll be performing on voice, fiddle, guitar, concertina and stomp box in a mixture of traditional material alongside his own songs from the albums ‘Painted Lady’ and ‘Songs from the Floodplain’. Ahead of the tour comes the re-release of ‘Painted Lady’, 10 years after its first issue. Navigator Records are issuing it on CD, vinyl and download, with new bonus tracks and full band versions.

A vivid L’Estrange release from Tenebrae ‘One gorgeous piece after another… a many-sided composer with prodigious gifts.’

John Rutter

‘Approachable and highly popular yet, at the same time, beautifully crafted and full of integrity’ Simon Halsey

US composer Derek Bermel is in Bavaria in September, where he is Composer-in-Residence at the prestigious Classix-Kempten festival of chamber music. Five of his works will be performed, including four German premieres and one world premiere – a new work for violin and piano, Over Algiers. Bermel will appear as clarinet soloist in two of these works.

‘If music be the food of love…’

London’s Cadogan Hall hosted a Shakespearean extravaganza ‘The Food of Love’ on 16 July, devised and conducted by Nigel Hess, and directed by Guy Unsworth. Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, this unique programme, presented by actors Gemma Arterton and Sir Patrick Stewart, comprised speeches, dialogues and events from the bard’s plays over many years. Hess conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Metro Voices and soloist Michael Dore, in music by Walton, Stephen Warbeck, Craig Armstrong, Vaughan Williams, Purcell and Hess himself.

PHOTOS: DEREK BERMEL © RICHARD BOWDITCH; JON BODEN

Featuring stunning performances from Tenebrae, Alexander L’Estrange’s debut sacred choral album ‘On Eagles’ Wings’ is out now on Signum Classics. For those more familiar with L’Estrange’s community works, this collection showcases a whole other side of his rich output. The album launched in April with a concert at St James’s Church, Spanish Place in London and several tracks were picked up

by Classic FM. ‘A rich, full-bottomed sound that finds the tragic mode in various prayers for peace and the exceptional My Song Is Love Unknown. Vivid, varied and completely satisfying.’

Choir & Organ (Brian Morton), July/August 2016

‘It’s attractive, approachable music, with nothing contrived or patronising about it. Standouts include the New College Service (ecstatic clustery beauty) and the simplicity of his Panis angelicus. This is sacred music written to be used.’

Gramophone (Lis Lân), June 2016

Goodall classic presented at Carnegie Hall Howard Goodall’s much-loved Eternal Light: A Requiem is to receive its New York premiere in Carnegie Hall on 20 November.

As Composer-in-Residence at Distinguished Concerts International New York, Goodall will attend this special event, which will bring together singers from across the US and the UK. Jonathan Griffith conducts the DCINY Singers and Orchestra.

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George Benjamin Scores from Faber Music HEAD OFFICE 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

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Dream of the Song A beguiling 20-minute work for countertenor, women’s voices and orchestra, Dream of the Song was premiered in 2015 by the countertenor Bejun Mehta, the Netherlands Chamber Choir and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by the composer. Employing a reduced orchestra (two oboes, four horns, two percussionists, two harps and strings), the work sets verse by three major poets who spent formative years in Granada; two Hebrew poets of the mid11th century, Samuel HaNagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol (sung by solo countertenor in English versions by Peter Cole), and Federico García Lorca (sung by the female chorus in the original Spanish). This inspired pairing of texts 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.

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

USA & CANADA

A Mind of Winter

Hire Schott Music Corporation/ European American Music Dist. Co. 254 West 31st Street, 15th Floor New York, NY 10001, USA Promotion: (212) 4616940 Rental: (212) 4616940 rental@eamdc.com

An atmospheric 10-minute setting of Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’ for soprano and orchestra, Benjamin’s A Mind of Winter (1981) reflects the poem’s abundance of winter imagery – and the deep ambiguity of its meaning – in music of striking, chilly beauty. The frozen, snow-covered terrain is depicted by a hanging immobile A minor chord on muted strings; suspended cymbals and divided string glissandi evoke icy gusts of wind. At the centre of the landscape stands the solitary Snow Man – a muted piccolo trumpet – around whom the soprano weaves slow, angular phrases whilst beholding ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’.

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

by Sam Wigglesworth with contributions from Tim Brooke and Rachel Topham Designed by Sam Wigglesworth COVER IMAGE: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL © SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE/ MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Full Score (ISBN 0-571-51162-7) available from fabermusicstore.com priced at £17.99

Sometime Voices Sometime Voices for baritone, chorus and orchestra is a setting of Caliban’s famous speech in Act III Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Composed in 1996, this 9-minute work places long, forceful baritone lines above an orchestra that drifts between an eerie tranquillity and mercurial activity.

Behind this, a chorus of spirits – sometimes benign, sometimes menacing – invoke his name.

‘What we experience are not only the magical sounds themselves, but Caliban’s own responses. His frissons of sensuous delight, his bewilderment, above all – in a brilliantly achieved orchestral climax – his inchoate terror are all musicked into being.’

The Times (Hilary Finch), 6 May 2003 Full Score (ISBN 0-571-51980-6) available from fabermusicstore.com priced at £16.99

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