Faber Music Performance News - Spring 2020

FABER MUSIC PERFORMANCE NEWS — SPRING 2020

fortissimo!

GEORGE BENJAMIN AT 60

Plus BBC mounts major Anders Hillborg festival Francisco Coll on his Violin Concerto for Kopatchinskaja Tom Coult at the Aldeburgh Festival Thomas Adès ballet set for Covent Garden

Highlights • Tuning In • Publications and Recordings

George Benjamin at 60 One of the world’s foremost musicians, George Benjamin celebrated his 60th birthday in January. From Stockholm to Paris, the recent months have seen several high-profile celebrations of his richly poetic and fastidiously imagined music, in which sensuous, alchemical sounds are fixed within a rigorous, totally assured architecture.

Dear colleagues, We make no apologies for featuring George Benjamin so prominently in this issue!

Reaching the age of 60 can be an important moment to reflect on one’s place in the world, past achievements, goals yet to be reached. When more than 40 years of that life have been spent in association with Faber Music, the picture is perhaps a little unique.

Unique particularly because George’s reputation has not been contained just within the UK. Attracting sufficient interest to be at the centre of a dedicated international festival of one’s music does not fall to every composer – particularly when the output is relatively small and new works infrequent. But such events have been a pattern in George’s life: from 1986 (Kings Lynn) to San Francisco’s ‘ Wet Ink’ in 1991; to 1992’s Carte blanche à George in Paris; 1993 where he hosted the first Meltdown on the South Bank in London, to Salzburg in 1995; to 1997’s Ars Musica in Brussels. Then a broader role when in 2000 he directed the Tanglewood Festival and the BBC’s Sounding the Century; in 2002 ‘By George!’ festival took off at the Barbican, followed by festivals in Strasbourg, Madrid, Berlin, Brussels, Paris (again), Lucerne, Ojai, New York, Aldeburgh, Stockholm, and Paris Présences which we feature on this page.

Latterly George’s reputation has been enhanced by his three operas – all of them becoming familiar to a wide public as they tour around the world; and his eminence and achievements have been recognised by many international awards, most recently a knighthood. But at no point in his life has George’s music been anything other than uncompromising, true to its creator and rigorous in its composition. I mention all these facts simply to encourage others who may feel that the world welcomes an easy option, a music fashioned to prevailing tastes and a music that is easy on the ear. All these things are true, but there is also room for great artists to pursue their dreams without constraints. We salute George for being one of the foremost in this category as well as achieving the phenomenal international success that he currently enjoys.

Sally Cavender Performance Music Director/Vice Chairman, Faber Music

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In March, Benjamin conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra in a concert featuring Duet and Dream of the Song, while in January the BBC re-aired its ‘Imagine’ documentary about his life and work.

A new production of Into the Little Hill by Alexander Polzin, using shadow theatre and Bunraku puppetry, was staged at 92nd Street Y, New York on 7 March.

Later this year sees the US premiere of Lessons in Love and Violence at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (in the original Katie Mitchell production) and the opera’s Swiss premiere at Theater St Gallen in a new production directed by Florentine Klepper. Events yet to be announced include a new production of Written on Skin and details of a new work for the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

Présences 2020: an excellent vintage In February, Radio France celebrated Benjamin’s music in Paris with an impressive and compendious focus at the Présences Festival. From concert performances of two operas, to chamber and orchestral works, over ten pieces were included in what was a resounding confirmation of Benjamin’s importance in French musical life. In the opening concert Benjamin conducted the Orchestre National de France in his Duet for piano and orchestra and Palimpsests. Pascal Rophé conducted the same orchestra in Sudden Time, while Kent Nagano led the Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur de Radio France in Sometime Voices, with baritone Gyula Orendt. Ensemble Intercontemporain presented Into the Little Hill, and Benjamin conducted Written on Skin with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (a performance which was repeated in Vienna).

‘A brilliant edition of Présences… a portrait commensurate with Benjamin’s excellence. Here we have a master in the old sense… isolating himself for months on end to chisel away at scores that have the purity of diamonds. Nothing is left to chance, and yet music seems to be constantly inventing itself… we are once again confounded by his mastery of the orchestra… The highlight was Written on Skin, his greatest triumph to date.’

Le Figaro (Christian Merlin), 18 February 2020

‘Palimpsests impresses with its formal perfection and a virtuosity of technique which, although hardly perceptible, contributes to the impression of the music’s progress being inexorable… The climax came with Written on Skin. The dramaturgy is written into the DNA of text and music… [in concert] we gain tenfold in our perception of the incredible refinement of the orchestral writing, whose depth of field opens up grandiose acoustic and dramatic spaces… It may be Benjamin’s birthday, but it is the public that receives a gift.’

Diapason (Pierre Rigaudière), 22 February 2020

HIGHLIGHTS George Benjamin Forthcoming performances Viola, Viola 24.3.20, Wigmore Hall, London: Lawrence Power/Timothy Ridout

Shadowlines 28.3.20, Boston; 4.4.20, 92nd Street Y, New York: Pierre-Laurent Aimard 25.9.20, University of Chicago: Gilles Vonsattel 20.11.20, Wigmore Hall, London: Cédric Tiberghien

Lessons in Love and Violence Swiss premiere - new production

‘[In Duet] Benjamin imagines all kinds of instrumental alloys between the timbres of orchestra and piano, with an almost cinematographic trajectory, where images and soundscapes pass by, as enigmatic as they are delectable… Palimpsests [is] one of Benjamin’s orchestral masterworks… an extraordinary sonic imagination. The palette is extravagantly rich and the alloys of timbres are always surprising. [Benjamin] leads the orchestra to speak with a rare acuity, conferring both the energy of the sound and the sensuality of the material.’

ResMusica (Michèle Tosi), 11 February 2020

Stockholm Composer Festival In November, Benjamin was the subject of the 2019 Stockholm Tonsättarfestivalen. With ten works featured over five concerts (including the Swedish premiere of Dance Figures), the prestigious festival was presented by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the Konserthuset. It also featured the Eric Ericsons Kammarkör and Norrköping Symphony Orchestra.

‘Imaginative and elegant music… Benjamin’s orchestral writing is always transparent and creates in its most beautiful moments a sense of wide horizons and high altitudes… [In Duet] the piano starkly hits individual notes while the brass intone like some vague foghorn in the distance. Cryptic and mightily alluring… [In] the evening’s most suggestive work, Sometime Voices… Benjamin engineers the ‘twangling instruments’ humming about Caliban’s ears in an incredible way, entirely worthy of the sorcerer Prospero.’

Dagens Nyheter (Camilla Lundberg), 23 November 2019

‘Benjamin’s music is always substantial; it doesn’t matter if the orchestra writing is reduced to brittle sounds or if they make the walls shake.’

Aftonbladet (Claes Wahlin), 26 November 2019

‘A Mind of Winter is surely the most beautiful, shimmering winter ever heard in music.’

Expressen (Lars Sjöberg), 22 November 2019

‘One could have filled a whole week with Benjamin’s music and not lacked variety… Dream of the Song unites impulsive sensuality with spiritual light…’

Svenska Dagbladet (Erik Wallrup), 22 November 2019

Written on Skin at Montréal Opera In January, Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin received its Canadian stage premiere at L’Opéra de Montréal, where Alain Gauthier directed a new production (the opera’s eighth to date!). Nicole Paiement conduced the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and a cast that included Magali Simard-Galdès (Agnès) and Daniel Okulitch (Protector).

‘A brilliant reading... With a dramatically powerful and musically robust show, l’Opéra de Montréal have succeeded in presenting an extraordinary Canadian premiere of this flagship 21st-century opera… A masterpiece… Crimp’s text has an implacable force… A dramatic steamroller of a work that must be heard in one sitting…

Musically, Written on Skin is a fascinating work of orchestral strata, in which the sounds cohere like illuminations… The orchestration is extremely refined throughout… a must-see.’

9.5.20, Theater St Gallen: Schöne/ Owens/Hofmann/Curievici/Hacker/ Zalenga/Labetskaya/Taskinen/ Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen/ Modestas Pitrenas/dir. Florentine Klepper US premiere 27.9.20, Lyric Opera House of Chicago: Degout/Jarman/Orendt/ Burden/Hacker/Sutphen/Reams/ Lyric Opera of Chicago/Sir Andrew Davis/dir. Katie Mitchell Spanish premiere Feb 2021, Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona; April 2021, Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain: Pons/dir. Mitchell

new work world premiere TBA Swiss premiere 28.8.2020, Lucerne Festival: Mahler Chamber Orchestra/George Benjamin

A Mind of Winter 10.12.20, Edinburgh; 11.12.20, Glasgow: Claire Booth/Scottish Chamber Orchestra/George Benjamin

Le Devoir (Christophe Huss), 27 January 2020

‘An incontestable masterpiece’ ‘7-and-a-half years after its triumphant premiere, the work does not cease to fascinate through its powerful emotional charge and extraordinarily refined musical language… Mindful to interpret the transformation of Agnès, the director shows how the humble, submissive, woman of the initial scenes gradually emancipates herself through her relationship with the Boy. To begin with symbolically constrained in her gestures by a corset with leather straps, she later frees herself from this bulky straitjacket… Authoritarian, at his wit’s end, and, finally, barbarically cruel, the Protector of Okulitch is excellent throughout… An incontestable masterpiece of the 21st Century.’

Avant Scène Opéra (Louis Bilodeau), 25 January 2020

PHOTO: GEORGE BENJAMIN CONDUCTING THE CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA IN 2015 © RENSKE VROLIJK

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BBC Mounts Major Anders Hillborg Festival

In February, the BBC celebrated the music of Anders Hillborg in one of its flagship ‘Total Immersion’ days. The most prestigious platform of its kind in the UK, the festival featured concerts, talks and a documentary screening before culminating in the UK premiere of a striking new orchestral work, Through Lost Landscapes, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo.

Through Lost Landscapes contains some of Hillborg’s most direct orchestral writing to date. Without being programmatic or didactic it nevertheless speaks urgently to the situation of the planet today: terrifying blasts of sound and seemingly endless glissandi are answered by haunting bird calls. A joint commission from the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, BBC Radio 3, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Minnesota and Helsinki Philharmonic orchestras, the 13-minute work had been premiered just a few weeks earlier in Valladolid, with Andrew Gourlay conducting.

The BBC SO concert also included the Clarinet Concerto ‘Peacock Tales’ with Martin Fröst, the thrilling orchestral showpieces Beast Sampler and Eleven Gates, and the UK premiere of the Violin Concerto No.1 with Carolin Widmann.

Enthralling choral works…

Environmental concerns also coloured another UK premiere: a new work for choir, saxophone and cello, entitled The Breathing of the World. The text for the new 10-minute work is Hillborg’s own: a lyrical celebration of nature with melancholic undertones reflecting on the state of our planet. Joined by Theo Hillborg (saxophone) and Filip Graden (cello), the BBC Singers and Ragnar Rasmussen explored the full range of Hillborg’s choral music - from his beautiful early work Lilla Sus Grav to the ever-popular Mouyayoum.

…and wide-ranging chamber pieces The day’s concerts began with an overview of Hillborg’s chamber music by students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

An astonishing range of pieces were featured, including the characterful Six Pieces for Wind Quintet and the Beethoven-infused Kongsgaard Variations for string quartet. The standout work, however, was the Duo for cello and piano (2013), which received its UK premiere in a stunningly assured performance from Ben Tarlton and Ben Smith. Hillborg’s most substantial chamber work to date, this gripping 16-minute piece opens with an impassioned recitative for the cello before taking in a dazzling array of emotional worlds.

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‘Fascinating, all of it.’

‘The Swedish composer’s attractive, eclectic, sometimes playful, often profound music is virtuosic, both in the tremendous demands it makes on its performers, and in the dexterous, even glamorous way Hillborg handles his forces, irrespective of whether he is writing instrumental duets or works for a Mahler-sized orchestra… High points elsewhere included Carolin Widmann’s fierce account of Hillborg’s flawed but ferocious First Violin Concerto, the mesmerising Eleven Gates and Through Lost Landscapes, which inveighs against our violation of our own planet in its depiction of forest wildlife under threat from environmental destruction.

Fascinating, all of it.’

The Guardian (Tim Ashley), 24 February 2020

‘Hillborg had a great success… Many of his fans from around the world travelled to London for this unique event: it’s the equivalent of a Swedish artist having a monographic exhibition at The Royal Academy… Eighteen compositions in one day — this format required both the heft of the BBC and an international composer of Hillborg’s status.’

Dagens Nyheter (Camilla Lundberg), 25 February 2020

‘Hillborg’s recent music has stepped into a new dimension.’

‘After centuries of composers writing music for orchestra, it must seem that there are no new sounds left to be discovered. Do not believe it: some composers are still opening doors to musical landscapes that are being discovered for the first time. One of these is Hillborg, still youthful in his mid-sixties… Hillborg’s recent music has stepped into a new dimension. At their best, the works performed here were pregnant with descriptive possibilities, expanses of sound that stretch out on a cosmic scale…

For the range of his musical imagination, nothing beats Eleven Gates, in which a series of tableaux open up multiple visions — horizons without end, whirlwinds, a universe glittering with stars, and a wailing effect on the woodwind…’

The Financial Times (Richard Fairman), 24 February 2020

PHOTO: ANDERS HILLBORG AND SAKARI ORAMO AT THE END OF THE BBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S TOTAL IMMERSION CONCERT

HIGHLIGHTS

Kopatchinskaja Premieres Francisco Coll Concerto

Composed for Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto is an imposing new work which pushes lyricism to breaking point.

Premiered in February by the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg under Gustavo Gimeno, this 25-minute work has been co-commissioned by the NTR ZaterdagMatinee, London Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony and Bamberger Symphoniker, an impressive list of partners that is a testament to Coll’s growing international reputation. One of the world’s most distinctive violinists, Kopatchinskaja has already performed Coll’s Four Iberian Miniatures, Hyperludes, Rizoma, LalulaLied, and the double concerto Les Plaisirs Illuminés. This creative partnership is nothing short of ideal: not only do both artists constantly push their disciplines to extremes, they also both delight in exploring the absurd and surreal.

Francisco Coll on the genesis of his Violin Concerto: “I can’t find the words to express my gratitude to the extraordinary people who made this project possible: I owe its existence entirely to the vision, talent and generosity of Gustavo Gimeno and Patricia Kopatchinskaja. In November 2016, thanks to the foresight of Gustavo, Patricia and I had a magical, and extremely fortunate, first meeting in Valencia – the kind of meeting where feelings of trust and deep friendship were evident from the very first minute. Soon after that, the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg – who certainly seem to know how to make a composer very happy – set in motion the commissioning of this Violin Concerto, joined by several other orchestras.

In what follows, ‘Hyperhymnia’, decaying fragments of Wagner (the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser) drift in and out of focus, like floating debris. There is a disquieting radiance to much of this movement, which has its beginnings in Hyperlude IV (the first Coll work that Kopatchinskaja played). After a series of cataclysmic climaxes, a searching cadenza totters abruptly into the final movement, ‘Phase’, which rudely announces itself in the form of an angular street dance. Here, the writing becomes increasingly sardonic, splintered… wavering on the edge of the void.

The three years it took me to write this Concerto were a unique and marvellous experience. By the end of the first year the initial sketch was completed, and a mysterious, lonely time followed. A unique and very necessary dialogue opened up between the work and myself, which allowed me to add overlooked aspects, to get rid of everything unnecessary and, finally, to focus on filing away the rough edges. During this process it was exciting to see the Concerto transforming itself – like some great elastic animal – into something different; my initial idea was too obvious a plan, and I am happy that the music itself was able to alert me to this. The Concerto encouraged me to face things that I had never done before. It seemed to be telling me: ‘don’t try to please a conservative public, or the institutionalized avant-garde, just write what you hear, and dare to fail’. An uncontrollable energy emerged from nowhere, a poetic beauty of a kind I had never consciously aimed toward rose to the music’s surface.

Coll’s concerto will next be heard at the NTR ZaterdagMatinee series in Amsterdam on 23 May, when Gimeno will conduct the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. A UK premiere follows in March 2021, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by FrançoisXavier Roth.

Gradually, I have begun to understand this Violin Concerto as a portrait of Kopatchinskaja. Like every portrait, it includes traces of its creator alongside unique and personal reflections on its subject.

One of the most exhilarating experiences of my creative life, it has expanded and, I hope, enhanced my perspectives as an artist.”

From the opening bars of the concerto’s first movement, ‘Atomised’, the listener is plunged headlong into a frenzied toccata-like texture which, despite its frantic upward surging gestures seems to be in constant freefall. Islands of lyricism materialise over deep, constantly shifting orchestral textures. Here, as throughout the work, the bravura solo writing seethes with wild, brittle energy.

PHOTO: FRANCISCO COLL © JUDITH COLL

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Tom Coult at the Aldeburgh Festival

Tom Coult will be featured prominently at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, with the premiere of his most ambitious work to date: the chamber opera Violet, to a text by Alice Birch.

In the festival’s opening concert, Britten Sinfonia will revive their 2015 commission My Curves Are Not Mad for string orchestra. A 14-minute work inspired by the late cut-outs of Henri Matisse, it displays Coult’s proclivity for clear incisive gestures and rich, luminescent harmonies. ‘I like Matisse’s approach’, Coult writes.

‘The shapes and lines of his cutouts are so incredibly imaginative, inventive and organic, but he suggests that they are conceived always with reference to plain vertical lines. I enjoy and identify with that.’

Also featured will be two new solo violin pieces, commisioned by the London Sinfonietta, and Coult’s new Violin Concerto, Pleasure Garden, with Daniel Pioro and the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Ilan Volkov.

‘Violet’ A co-production by Music Theatre Wales, Aldeburgh Festival and Theater Magdeburg, Coult’s chamber opera Violet will be premiered at Snape Maltings on 14 June before being toured across the UK. An 85-minute work for four singers and ensemble of 14 players, the opera was created together with Alice Birch, best known for her acclaimed play Anatomy of a Suicide. Andrew Gourlay will conduct the London Sinfonietta, with Elizabeth Atherton in the title role.

Jude Christian directs.

Loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Devil in the Belfry, the opera concerns the inhabitants of a village which begins losing hours from its day – one night, an hour disappears. On day two, two hours are missing, on day three, three are gone. Our story takes place over 24 increasingly short days, as time drains from the world, until the opera snaps shut as the final hour vanishes. Full performance details can be found on page 13.

Beyond the Pastoral: Vaughan Williams 150 With the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth in 2022, what better opportunity to reassess the music of this central figure in 20th-Century Music?

Behind the received image of RVW as the grumpy, rather tweedy, pastoralist lies a far more complex reality. One of the leading symphonists of his time, and a crucial figure in the folk-song revival, Vaughan Williams developed his distinctive ‘British’ language after immersing himself in the work of the French masters, and many of his key works respond obliquely to the tumultuous events of world history he lived through. Writing about his Pastoral Symphony (his Third), he stated: ‘It’s really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset. It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted.’

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IMAGE: TOM COULT © MAURICE FOXALL

One of the jewels in the Faber catalogue is Sancta Civitas (1925), the 30-minute oratorio for tenor, baritone, choruses and orchestra which sets texts from the Book of Revelation. According to the late Michael Kennedy, who was a leading authority on Vaughan Williams, it is the most personal of all the composer’s works.

Other notable works include the folk-infused ballad opera Hugh the Drover (1956), and the Three Choral Hymns for baritone or tenor solo, SATB chorus and orchestra (1929). Meanwhile, the performing version of the complete incidental music for The Wasps (1909) for narrator, male voices and orchestra has not yet been presented live in concert.

Faber Music also publishes several fascinating early chamber works, and completions of unfinished pieces. Antony Payne orchestrated two of the Nocturnes for baritone and orchestra, whilst David Matthews’ Dark Pastoral is a beguiling completion of the slow movement of the unfinished Cello Concerto.

HIGHLIGHTS

Repertoire Focus: Concert Openers

Anne Boyd | At The Rising of the Sun (2001)

David Matthews | New Fire (2018)

One of Australia’s most distinguished and best-loved composers, Anne Boyd celebrates her 75th birthday in 2021. Much of her rich and varied output is spiritual and meditative in nature and draws heavily on East-Asian musical traditions, especially those of Japan and Indonesia.

Inspired by the new fire kindled at the start of the Easter Saturday, service this lyrical 6-minute work for orchestra begins in hushed darkness with muted strings. As the piece develops, solo cello then later violins into a plainsong melody as points of light begin to appear in glockenspiel, crotales, piano, harp and then high woodwind; they gradually proliferate, until the trumpets enter with the three rising notes of the plainsong. New Fire culminates in what David Matthews describes as ‘a triumphant celebration of light’.

Composed in 2001, this luminous 10-minute orchestral work begins with blazing brass fanfares before tracing one long, inexorable journey that takes in everything from hushed meditative textures to awe-inspiring sonic vistas.

Tansy Davies | Tilting (2005) Tilting is a deliciously gritty orchestra work, which typifies the quirky rhythms and extreme instrumental colours of Tansy Davies’ style. Across its 7-minute canvas, it takes the audience through a determined, almost menacing landscape of large, spiky gestures and awkward, fragmented melody. Davies draws inspiration from the architect Zaha Hadid and replicates the contorted shapes of her designs by twisting and splitting a French Touvère song so that it appears differently in each instance. Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, the work has since been performed in Zagreb at the ISCM World Music Days, by three other UK orchestras, and by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.

Jonathan Harvey | Body Mandala (2006) Inspired by Buddist purification rituals that Harvey witnessed when travelling in Tibet, this arresting 13-minute work was one of a clutch of late orchestral masterpieces he wrote for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. The distinctive low horns, tungchens, and the magnificently raucous 4-note oboes, gelings, are imitated in earthy, visceral textures, while wild, jazzy outbursts in the woodwind provide contrast.

Anna Meredith | Fringeflower (2006) The overlapping, floating thematic material of this 5-minute chamber orchestra work is light and colourful with a quirky, bluntly obtrusive, feel to it. Meredith gleaned her inspiration from a Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolour, ‘Butterfly Flower’, and the link is clear: stems and petals in inoffensive colours lie atop one another with no concern with how they might interact. It has a carefree, dreamlike quality to it, which Meredith has astutely carried over into her music.

As with the flowers, each instrument type has a clearly defined and individual character. They present their themes with very little commonality, or reaction, yielding a music of multiple discrete layers.

Meredith maintains the drive of the piece not by altering harmony or development, but by changing the density, position and frequency of the instruments’ statements, like pushing drawings around on layers of tracing paper.

Martin Suckling | Release (2013) A thrilling 12-minute concert opener premiered by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Release unfolds as a vivid drama covering a dizzying range of emotions and a vast orchestral canvas. Loud common-chord strikes by the whole orchestra leave behind a trace of microtonal clusters, which eventually blossom into rich, resonant harmonies; a viola and cor anglais melody gradually expands to fill the available space; and chaotic, dense harmonic exhalations which gradually coalesce into simple pulses. In the uppermost register of the violins, a song begins to emerge.

PHOTOS: ANNE BOYD © JIM ROLON, WITH THANKS TO AUSTRALIAN MUSIC CENTRE; MARTIN SUCKLING © SARA PORTER; TANSY DAVIES © RIKARD ÖSTERLUND; DAVID MATTHEWS © CLIVE BARDA; ANNA MEREDITH © KATE BONES; JONATHAN HARVEY © MAURICE FOXALL

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Oliver Knussen Forthcoming performances

Oliver Knussen

Cantata/Songs without Voices

Bassoon solo published

24.3.20: Wigmore Hall, London: Nash Ensemble/Royal Academy Students/Jonathan Berman

Faber Music is pleased to announce the publication of Knussen’s Study for “Metamorphosis” for solo bassoon.

Ophelia Dances

Initially composed in the early 1970s before being revised extensively by Knussen in 2018, this characterful 5-anda-half-minute work for solo bassoon is an important addition to the repertoire. Exploring the full expressive range of the instrument – from high mellifluous writing to dark, rasping statements, this virtuosic monody takes its title from Kafka. It is presented here in a new typeset edition, supplemented by a fascinating facsimile page from the work’s earlier incarnation.

3.4.20, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Frankfurt: IEMA 25.9.20, University of Chicago: Grossman Ensemble

Reflection Japanese premiere 29.4.20, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; 29.5.20, Tokyo Opera City: Leila Josefowicz/Thomas Adès

Océan de Terre

O Hototogisu!*/Two Organa/Requiem *Dutch premiere 14.5.20, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam: Katrien Baerts/ Asko|Schönberg/Bas Wiegers

Hums and Songs of Winnie-the-Pooh 8.6.20, Teatro Elfo Puccini, Milan: Sentieri Selvaggi/Carlo Boccadoro 16.10.20, Norwich; 20.10.20, Cambridge, 21.10.20, Wigmore Hall, London: Britten Sinfonia

Songs without Voices 13.6.20, Aldeburgh Festival: Nash Ensemble/Martyn Brabbins

Océan de Terre 19.6.20, Kings Place, London: Sarah Dacey/The Riot Ensemble/Aaron Holloway-Nahum

Requiem/Ophelia Dances 10.12.20, Edinburgh; 11.12.20, Glasgow: Clare Booth/Scottish Chamber Orchestra/George Benjamin

Requiem 29.7.20, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival: Tony Arnold/Festival Artists/ James Gaffigan

Fanfares for Tanglewood 12.12.20, Barbican, London: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Ryan Wigglesworth

Whitman Settings 27.5.21, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam: Claron McFadden/ Alexander Melnikov

Tributes in Paris, LA and Amsterdam The LA Philharmonic remembered Oliver Knussen in December with two programmes co-curated by Susanna Mälkki and Leila Josefowicz. Five Knussen works were featured in total, with Flourish with Fireworks and the Violin Concerto complemented by a Green Umbrella concert which included Ophelia Dances and Reflection for violin and piano. Writing in the LA Times, Mark Swed singled out Reflection, Knussen’s penultimate work, for special praise: ‘A gentle and towering giant of British music… he is already taking on the stature of a legend.

The takeaway from the Philharmonic’s tribute to Knussen is that his legacy will inevitably continue to grow larger and larger… I am convinced that he was the greatest British musician of his time… the biggest news of the tribute was Reflection… Watery figuration in the piano and trills in the violin set a contemplative tone that expands into supreme, stunning lyricism. It is a small, late masterpiece.’

LA Times (Mark Swed) 11 December 2019​

As its name suggests, this enchanting 8-minute piece is made up of various kinds of musical reflection: melody reflected in its inversion; a six-note mode reflected in its complement; and the relationships between the three main parts of the piece, which are, in a way, varied reflections of each other. There are some reflections in water too; the work’s opus number (31a) demonstrating a relationship to Knussen’s unfinished Cleveland Pictures: ‘The main melody began as a response to Gauguin’s painting of a Breton woman swimming’, Knussen wrote, ‘and there is also, perhaps, an echo of the lonely underwater world of an ondine, eventually breaking the surface at the end of the piece.’

December also saw the Ensemble intercontemporain stage a Knussen concert with Brad Lubman and soprano Claire Booth, whilst in February the London Sinfonietta payed tribute at Festival Présences. Asko|Schönberg has programmed its own homage to Knussen on 14 May.

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PHOTO: OLIVER KNUSSEN © NIGEL LUCKHURST

In June, the Riot Ensemble will give a rare performance of Knussen’s Océan de Terre, his marvellous setting of Apollinaire for soprano and chamber ensemble. Dedicated to Knussen’s teacher Gunther Schuller, it sets one of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Calligrammes’ (in French), the voice delicately interwoven into an instrumental texture of intricately worked cross-currents. Behind the music’s beguiling surface is a complex architecture based around two 12-note chords, which in the music’s final moments fan out in a way analogous to the watery imagery of the text.

Eerie, surreal and powerfully atmospheric, this 12-minute piece would make an interesting pairing with Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé or Stravinsky’s Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont.

Walking a high wire One of Knussen’s most celebrated works, his Violin Concerto begins and ends with the same arresting sonority: a clangorous tubular-bell chord and a stratospheric high E on the violin. ‘At times’, observed Knussen, ‘the soloist resembles a tightrope walker progressing along a (decidedly unstable) high wire strung across the span that separates the opening and closing sounds.’ The 17-minute work – now very much part of the repertoire – was performed in February by the London Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko, with soloist Daniel Pioro stepping in for an indisposed Leila Josefowicz on just six days’ notice!

‘An orchestrator of genius’ ‘A masterpiece. Every Knussen work is masterly in some way, but his magical Violin Concerto surely represents a pinnacle. Its achingly lyrical slow movement is framed by two quick-changing acrobatic displays, the music bathed throughout in a seductive, mysterious timbres and crystalline colour effects only possible with an orchestrator of genius... Pioro conquered what had been an unfamiliar piece with flames of passion and high technical flair.’

The Times (Richard Morrison), 20 February 2020

TUNING IN

David Matthews Revisiting: Cantiga With the exciting news of Matthews’ operatic plans, what better time to revisit one of his most celebrated vocal works: Cantiga, a dramatic scena for soprano and chamber orchestra (1988).

This richly effective work sets a text by Maggie Hemingway – the extraordinary story of the 14th-century woman Inês de Castro, lover of the Portuguese Prince Don Pedro, who was murdered on the orders of King Alfonso IV. Across Cantiga’s 24-minute span, Matthews rises splendidly to the challenges set by this macabre subject. A rich, gritty, tapestry of sounds is drawn from the orchestra, and three lyrical monologues are separated by a pair of impressive orchestral interludes. The last scene is a chilling sarabande, as Inês sings of her obsession from beyond the grave.

Towards an opera Generous support from the PRS Composers Fund has enabled Matthews to realise a long-held dream in one of the few genres he has yet to tackle: opera. The first act of what will eventually become a 100-minute opera in two parts was performed with piano accompaniment at the National Opera Studio on 16 March.

‘The word setting is sumptuous and bold… the orchestral writing brilliantly assured.’

The Sunday Times (Paul Driver), 31 July 1988

Nicholas Maw

The opera – provisionally titled An Angel Passes – is set in a central European country during the 1989 revolutions, and deals with the seismic fall of communism, with its unforeseen and disturbing consequences. It is a subject close to the heart of Matthews and his librettist, the late Sir Roger Scruton, who both knew Czechoslovakia well in the communist period when they were part of an underground university and met many dissidents.

Matthews’ ease in handling large-scale forms, sensitive word-setting, keen dramatic instinct, and vast experience in writing for voices, all make him a natural opera composer. ‘For much of my composing life I have longed to write an opera,’ says Matthews, ‘but, until now, have never found the right subject, librettist, or opportunity. I learned much about vocal writing as Britten’s assistant, and it has always been my central preoccupation; I think of music above all as song.’

Scriabin orchestration Renowned for his handling of the orchestra, Matthews has recently completed a new orchestration of Scriabin’s compelling six-minute piano piece Vers la flamme.

Composed in 1914, this was one of Scriabin’s final works and, with extreme thematic economy, the music moves in an unbroken, overwhelming ascent from murky claustrophobia to blinding ecstasy.

With the paucity of short orchestral pieces from Scriabin’s mature period, this orchestration will be a very useful addition to the catalogue, particularly in 2022, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

PHOTO: DAVID MATTHEWS © CLIVE BARDA

David Matthews Forthcoming performances Band of Angels 2.4.20, St John’s Smith Square, London: Catherine Ennis

A Song for Max 4.4.20, Memorial Hall, Beverley: Fiona Slominska/John Slack/ Hannah Dawson/Cara Berridge/ James Baillieu

It takes two 10.5.20, Burgh House, London: Emma Arizza/Maria Grecu

Dark Pastoral 20.6.20, Theater Marl: Paul Böhme/ Musikgemeinschaft Marl/Wolfgang Endros

Arrangements Elgar – String Quartet

16.5.20, Great Malvern Priory: English String Orchestra/Kenneth Woods

Scriabin flamme

– Vers la

16.5.20, St Barnabas Church, Ealing, London: Ealing Symphony Orchestra/ John Gibbons

Nicholas Maw Forthcoming performances Dance Scenes 30.6.20, St John’s Smith Square, London: Kensington Symphony Orchestra/Russell Keable

The Head of Orpheus 9.8.20, Tanglewood Festival: Fromm Players

Premiere orchestral recordings A new Nicholas Maw recording from William Boughton and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales has just been released on Lyrita Records, shedding important light on the wonderful music of this neglected master. The disc will feature premiere recordings of Maw’s Voices of Memory and Spring Music alongside a new account of his significant 27-minute Sonata for solo violin by Harriet Mackenzie.

A bright and boldly contoured curtain raiser, Maw’s Spring Music (1983) burgeons with lyrical vitality. Lasting 14 minutes and scored for a modest orchestra (double wind, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, harp and strings), the work takes its cue from the well-known line of Dylan Thomas that for its composer seems to sum up the energy and beauty of spring: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’

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Thomas Adès Forthcoming performances

Thomas Adès

Lieux retrouvés

The Dante trilogy

26-28.3.20, Symphony Hall, Boston: Steven Isserlis/Boston Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Following the auspicious premiere of Adès’ ballet score Inferno in Los Angeles last year – with a spontaneous standing ovation mid-way through the concert premiere conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, and then a critically acclaimed staging with Wayne McGregor’s choreography – expectation mounts for the stage premiere of the complete ballet trilogy at Covent Garden in June. The thrilling 40-minute score to Inferno will be joined by Purgatorio (c.18 mins) and Paradiso (c.24 mins), all with choreography by McGregor and designs by Tacita Dean.

24.5.20, Munich: Steven Isserlis/ Munich Chamber Orchestra/Christian Kluxen 2-3.10.20, Die Glocke, Bremen: Steven Isserlis/Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/ Thomas Adès

Violin Concerto 26,29.3.20, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; 27.3.20, Lübeck: Leila Josefowicz/NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester/Krzsystof Urbanksi 5-6.6.20, Symphony Hall, Phoenix: Chloë Hanslip/The Phoenix Symphony/Tito Munoz

In Seven Days 1.4.20, Royal Festival Hall, London: Nicolas Hodges/London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra 2-4.4.20, Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles: LA Philharmonic/Thomas Adès 10-11.10.20, Powell Hall, St Louis: Kirill Gerstein/St Louis Symphony/ John Storgårds 21.9.20, Barbican, London: Kirill Gerstein/City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla 25-30.3.21, Chicago Symphony Center: Kirill Gerstein/Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Three-piece Suite from Powder Her Face 2-4.4.20, Chicago Symphony Center: Chicago Symphony Orchestra/ Jakub Hrusa 23-25.4.20, Severance Hall, Cleveland: Cleveland Orchestra/ Thomas Søndergård

Powder Her Face new production 3-7.4.20, Grand Théâtre de Tours: Cals/Hershkowitz/Boyd/Nolen/ Opéra de Tours/Rory MacDonald/dir.

Dieter Kaegi

Barbican focus London’s Barbican has announced a major focus on the music of Thomas Adès running throughout its 20/21 season, featuring over ten works. Celebrating Adès’ 50th birthday (2021), it is the largest UK celebration of his music since the ‘Traced Overhead’ festival in 2007.

The season includes a world premiere for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, while the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst will give the London premiere of the Angel Symphony. Simon Rattle opens the London Symphony Orchestra’s season with the Luxury Suite from Powder Her Face, and Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra perform Adès’ now iconic Asyla.

Gustavo Dudamel will present a concert performance of all three parts of Adès’ Dante ballet with the LA Philharmonic, whilst Adès himself conducts Totentanz with the LSO, a late-night concert with the LA Philharmonic New Music Group, and a concert performance of his second opera The Tempest with Britten Sinfonia.

2021 – the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death – will see Gustavo Dudamel conduct the full trilogy of scores in both LA and London, as well as Adès himself conducting Inferno with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The Italian premiere of Inferno, also scheduled for 2021, will be announced in the coming months.

A riotous carnival of the macabre, Adès’ Inferno is imbued with the spirit of Liszt. ‘Liszt really owns hell and the demoniacal,’ Adès explained to the LA Times. ‘I looked at what he’d done, and those sounds that arose in him were still completely live cultures. I could put them in passages and new things would happen. So the music in Inferno moves from absolutely 100% me, to 100% Liszt and every gradation in between. I wanted to have this strange feeling that you were almost falling down into the past’.

In this, his first score designed specifically for ballet, Adès demonstrates in no uncertain terms his total intuitive understanding of the genre. From the arresting opening ‘Abandon Hope’ to the final pages which depict Dante and Virgil climbing out of Hell and seeing the stars, Adès keeps us spellbound. A dark-hued rendering of Liszt’s La Lugubre Gondola ushers in The Ferryman who rows dead souls across the river Styx whilst extraordinary orchestrations of the Bagatelle sans tonalité and the Grand Galop Chromatique transfigure the virtuosic piano writing of the originals into great visceral riots of orchestral sound, further amplifying the music’s manic, devilish energies.

Three Studies from Couperin 3.4.20, Komische Oper, Berlin: Orchester der Komischen Oper Berlin/Clemens Schuldt 8.4.20, Stadthaus Winterthur: Musikkollegium Winterthur/Clemens Schuldt 18.5.20, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London: English Chamber Orchestra/ Xian Zhang 4-7.11.20, Sydney Town Hall: Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Jaime Martin

new work for violin and piano world premiere 29.4.20, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; 29.5.20, Recital Hall, Tokyo: Leila Josefowicz/Thomas Adès

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PHOTO: THOMAS ADÈS © MARCO BORGGREVE; INFERNO, PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY CRAIG MATHEW MATHEW IMAGING​​​AT THE WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL PROVIDED COURTESY OF THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC ASSOCIATION

TUNING IN

Malcolm Arnold

Dante: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso

The Angel Symphony

world premiere of complete ballet

In May 2020 the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will premiere Adès’ Angel Symphony. Drawing on the extraordinary score to The Exterminating Angel, the work will be around 20 minutes long and has been commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Kölner Philharmonie, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, National Orchestra of Spain and the Barbican Centre.

6.5-1.6.20, Royal Opera House, London: The Royal Ballet/Thomas Adès and Koen Kessels/chor. Wayne McGregor US premiere 8-10.4.21, Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles; 22.5.21, Barbican, London: LA Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel

Asyla/Violin Concerto/Polaris 28.5.20, Tokyo Opera City: Leila Josefowicz/NHK Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Both the Birmingham and Cleveland orchestras will tour the piece and there are already over 20 performances scheduled. Shortly after the work’s premiere, the CBSO will record it for release on Deutsche Grammophon.

Tevot 5-6.6.20, Jacksonville: Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Courtney Lewis

Angel Symphony

Piano Concerto breaks all records The extraordinary success of Adès’ Concerto for Piano and Orchestra continues to gather momentum, with recent performances in London, Cleveland, Munich, Amsterdam and Helsinki, as well as the release of the world premiere recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon. The concerto has already received 14 performances, with over 30 more already scheduled (all with Kirill Gerstein, the musical dynamo for whom it was written, at the piano).

This audacious 22-minute work (Adès’ third concertante work with piano) is stunning in its wealth of invention.

Throughout its three movements a highly sophisticated yet vital approach to rhythmic feel is married to a totally personal harmonic sense. The resulting work is by turns playful, sombre, rowdy and ravishingly beautiful.

Premiered in March 2019 by the Boston Symphony (its sole commissioner), the concerto is a testament to Adès and Gerstein’s close artistic partnership. The pair have worked together many times, both in concertos and as duo partners, and the solo writing is tailor-made for Gerstein’s particular combination of jaw-dropping virtuosity and razor-sharp musical intelligence.

‘Adès is one of the most compelling musicians of our time… His music thrillingly makes the familiar sound fresh – keeping the tradition alive.’

Helsingin Sanomat (Jukka Isopuro), 30 November 2019

‘The electricity of the occasion is vividly captured [by the recording] and the concerto bursts into life like a big, bold, fractured reflection of the Ravel or Prokofiev concertos. Rhythms are dislocated and styles clash in the face-off between heroic pianist and noisy, glittering orchestra.’

The Financial Times (Richard Fairman), 28 February 2020

‘A major addition to the repertoire – a bold, dramatic and showy concerto that sounds somehow both Romantic and wonderfully modern.’

Gramophone Online (James Jolly), 4 March 2020

PHOTO: MALCOLM ARNOLD

Thomas Adès Forthcoming performances

world premiere

2021: Arnold Centenary In 2021, the centenary of Malcolm Arnold’s birth provides the ideal opportunity to reassess this fascinating and indispensable figure of 20th-century British Music.

There can’t be any professional musician trained in the UK who is not familiar with the engaging and directly communicative qualities of Arnold’s work, but behind the popular image of Arnold is a much more complex personality, with a remarkably diverse output to match.

Arnold’s symphonies, works into which the composer poured his most serious and compelling musical statements, not to mention some of his most personal and emotional music, have for too long been unjustly overlooked. His Seventh Symphony, completed in 1973 is a startlingly original work (arguably the most deeply personal of all Arnold’s nine symphonies) and now boasts four separate commercial recordings.

Rinaldo and Armida The BBC Concert Orchestra and Barry Wordsworth will perform Arnold’s ballet score Rinaldo and Armida in Northampton as part of the opening Gala Concert of the Malcolm Arnold Festival on 16 October.

13-14.5.20, Symphony Hall, Birmingham; 14.10.20, Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles; 18.10.20, Davis Hall, San Francisco; 23.10.20, Carnegie Hall, New York: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/ Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla (touring) 1.10.20, Severance Hall, Cleveland; 8.10.20, Aalborg; 12.10.20, Barbican, London; 14.10.20, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; 17.10.20, Kölner Philharmonie: Cleveland Orchestra/ Franz Welser-Möst (touring)

Three Berceuses 18.10.20, Ukaria Cultural Centre: Lawrence Power/Simon CrawfordPhillips 19.11.20, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam: Lawrence Power/Lera Auerbach

Dante: Inferno 18-19.6.20, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Thomas Adès 10.8.20, Tanglewood Festival: TMC Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Luxury Suite from Powder Her Face 13.9.20, Barbican, London: London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle

This engaging 23-minute ‘dance-drama’ in one act was premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1955, to choreography by none other than Frederick Ashton. Inspired by a passage from Tasso, it is one of Arnold’s most considerable achievements, full of firstrate invention and manifesting a sure dramatic instinct.

The deadly enchantress Armida, whose lovers meet their doom in her garden, meets her own end when she falls in love with one of them: the mortal warrior Rinaldo. The ballet was conceived as a vehicle for the ballerina Svetlana Beriosova and took the form of an extended pas de deux.

new work for strings

A 9-minute arrangement of the Introduction and Pas-deDeux, arranged by Christopher Palmer for Arnold’s 70th birthday celebrations in 1991, is also available for hire.

30.4.21, Barbican, London: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo

world premiere 20.10.20, Barbican, London: Australian Chamber Orchestra

Totentanz 7.3.21, Barbican, London: London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Chamber Symphony 6.4.21, Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles; 22.5.21: Barbican, London: LA Philharmonic New Music Group/ Thomas Adès

Asyla

The Tempest 28.6.21, Barbican Hall, London: Britten Sinfonia/Thomas Adès

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Tansy Davies Forthcoming performances

Tansy Davies

loure

Chamber opera available online

19.5.20, Imperial College London: Darragh Morgan

Fresh from winning an RPS Award in November, Tansy Davies’s chamber opera Cave is now available to stream on the London Sinfonietta’s new online channel. Premiered in 2018 in the vast warehouse space of The Printworks, Cave was produced by the London Sinfonietta and cocommissioned by the Royal Opera. Lucy Bailey directed.

Furthering Davies’ collaboration with the writer Nick Drake, this 60-minute work follows a grieving father’s quest for survival and renewal, in a world plagued by environmental disaster. Desperate to connect one last time with his daughter (Elaine Mitchener), a man (Mark Padmore) enters a cave, triggering a journey into an underworld of spirits.

grind show (unplugged) June 2020, Gran Canaria: Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

new work for string quartet world premiere 11.10.20, Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie, Berlin; 27.2.21, Purcell Room, London, UK: Arditti Quartet

The rule is love German premiere 17.10.20, Donaueschinger Musiktage: Elaine Mitchener/MAM Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik

The rule is love In November a new song cycle by Tansy Davies – The rule is love – was premiered by contralto Elaine Mitchener, the London Sinfonietta and Richard Baker. Commissioned by the Sinfonietta, Kings Place and the Donaueschingen Musiktage, the 10-minute work sets two texts by John Berger and Sylvia Wynter – each of which appears twice.

‘They’re weird pop songs, a little bit inspired by the David Lynch aesthetic’, explains Davies. ‘The first and the third are related – they’re dark and funky – while the second is sweet and floaty. The last song is more epic; it doesn’t just do one thing, there’s more of a narrative, and it ends up in a very different place to where it began’.

The work, which is scored for contralto, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, percussion, violin and double bass, was premiered as part of a portrait concert entitled ‘Jolts and Pulses’ which also included neon, grind show (electric) and Undertow.

The rule is love will receive its German premiere in October, when Mitchener will be joined by players from Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik.

‘Music that is entirely itself, with a raw intensity impossible to ignore’ ‘A vivid demonstration of how distinctive Davies’ music can be… [The rule is love is] haunted by the tropes of pop music… as in so much of Davies’ music, the fragile surfaces seem to hide much more than they reveal… salt box and grind show underpin moody ensemble writing with mysterious, threatening electronic sounds… The concert ended with what is perhaps the archetypal Davies work to date, neon, in which pulse schemes influenced by Birtwistle are overlaid with the driving insistence of funk… it’s music that is entirely itself, with a raw intensity impossible to ignore.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 11 November 2019

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PHOTO: TANSY DAVIES © RIKARD ÖSTERLUND

Across eight scenes, six instrumentalists create a richly alluring, glittering soundworld, prominently flecked with harp. At key moments the players take on solo roles: a horn rides the natural harmonics in broad upward surges, the clarinet duets in the stratosphere with the mezzo’s twittering vocalisations, and later a violin joins her in a folksy, lilting lullaby. Everything is couched in a vast, slowmoving cave of electronic sound (based on Davies’ darkly lustrous string orchestra work Dune of Footprints) which provides the beguiling harmonies underpinning the drama.

Crash Ensemble records Antenoux The Crash Ensemble, who commissioned Davies’ 5-minute ensemble work Antenoux in 2017, have recorded it for their own label Crash Records. Scored for ten players, it fluctuates between two kinds of energy: sultry and brooding cycles of highly rhythmic material and more streamlined linear phrases.

‘The highlight of the international contributions is the Captain Beefheart-esque Antenoux, its lysergic guitar lines snapping in and out of focus.’

Gramophone (Liam Cagney), February 2020

Soul Canoe Watery dreamscapes and dark, uncanny energies combine in Soul Canoe, Davies’ recent work for ten players which received its UK premiere from the Red Note Ensemble at Sound Scotland in November. The German premiere, by ensemble oktopus, followed in February.

An electric guitar cuts a lonely figure through much of the atmospheric 20-minute work, obsessively returning to two ominous blues-tinged idées fixes. The iridescent first movement repeatedly circles around itself – pulsating and flickering – whilst similar looping processes play out in the second, which riffs on some searingly elemental material from Cave. The third movement sees mournful flugelhorn and guitar melodies snagging behind nervous web-like textures, while the last movement is imbued with a lucid calm, with pared-back rhythmic writing and hushed dynamics seeming to denote an opening out of some kind.

It’s a luminous and compelling conclusion, with wind instruments tracing sinuous, echoing patterns that glide over a smooth but fast-moving soundstream.

TUNING IN

Tom Coult

Julian Anderson

Tom Coult Forthcoming performances Schumann – Studies in Canonic Form 28.3.20, St Mary the Virgin, Oxford: Oxford Sinfonia/Robert Weaver

I Find Planets world premiere 4.6.20, Kings Place, London: The Hermes Experiment

Pleasure Garden world premiere 4.6.20, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester; 19.6.20, Aldeburgh Festival: Daniel Pioro/BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/ Ilan Volkov

Inventions (For Heath Robinson)

Pleasure Garden

The Discovery of Heaven

Pleasure Garden, a new violin concerto from Tom Coult will be unveiled this summer. Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and Salford University in association with the Royal Horticultural Society, the 27-minute work will be premiered by Daniel Pioro and the BBC Philharmonic at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall on 4 June and will receive a second performance at the Aldeburgh Festival. Both performances will be conducted by Ilan Volkov.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra and John Storgårds will perform Julian Anderson’s The Discovery of Heaven in September, as part of the orchestra’s 2020 Vision project.

The winner of a 2012 South Bank Award, this thrilling three-movement work was a co-commission by the LPO, with whom Anderson was Composer in Residence, and the New York Philharmonic.

The four movements of the concerto take inspiration from various images and stories about constructed ‘natural spaces’ in and around cities, from the 9th-century rainmaking contest at the Sacred Spring Garden of Kyoto’s Imperial Palace, to 14th-century composer and organetto player Francesco Landini serenading the birds in Florence’s Paradiso gardens.

Other upcoming projects include a new work for The Hermes Experiment, I Find Planets, and two additions to Coult’s ongoing series of Études for solo violin.

Energy of gesture, richness of sound Quatuor Diotima gave the French premiere of Tom Coult’s String Quartet in February as part of Radio France’s Présences Festival. Commissioned by the Hepner Foundation and premiered by the Arditti Quartet in 2018, this 12-minute work is characterised by the unusual tunings of half of the instruments – the 2nd violin and viola have all their strings tuned down a semitone and a tone respectively. This greatly expands the number of different pitches available to be played as open strings. Unlike the conventional tuning of a quartet, this combination contains 16 unique strings. All of the five movements are, in some sense, explorations of the distinctive timbre of open strings. It’s an ingenious work, with a fascinating mix of clarity and strangeness.

‘A well-executed work that delineates different areas of tension between the energy of gestures and the richness of particular sound combinations.’

ResMusica (Vincent Guillemin), 17 February 2020

The extremely slow textures of the first movement, ‘An Echo from Heaven’, are informed by Japanese Gagaku, while the second, ‘In the Street’, is an increasingly rowdy set of street parades. The third, ‘Hymns’ remains one of Anderson’s most spectacular orchestral creations, with two highly distinctive types of music pitted against each other.

Second Quartet in New York In March the Locrian Chamber Players gave the New York premiere of Anderson’s String Quartet No.2: ‘300 Weihnachtslieder’. Drawing much of its character from the rich sonorities of church bells, which also underpin his orchestral works Symphony and Eden, this seven-movement quartet also references a wealth of traditional German Christmas songs.

The 17-minute work begins with each of the instruments tuned conventionally, but, as it develops, scordaturas are employed to lend certain passages specific hues. In the last three movements, the cello tunes its C string down a tone, further expanding the resonant possibilities of the ensemble and thus enabling visceral, weighty climaxes.

This is music of startling concentration: at times, the textures are so complex that bowing position, pressure and changes all require notation on separate staves.

5.6.20, Salisbury Festival; 6.6.20, York Late Music; 7.6.20, St Anne’s Kew Green, London: Adam Swayne

My Curves are not Mad 12.6.20, Aldeburgh Festival (at St Edmundsbury Cathedral): Britten Sinfonia/Ryan Wigglesworth

Violet world premiere 13.6.20, Aldeburgh Festival; 23.6.20, Theatr Clwyd, Mold; 13.7.20, Buxton Festival; 26.9-2.10.20, Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London; 14.10.20, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff: Atherton/Carlton Hines/Gregory/ Graham-Hall/Music Theatre Wales/ London Sinfonietta/Andrew Gourlay (William Cole in Mold)/dir. Jude Christian

Piano Trio “The Chronophage” 14.6.20, National Sawdust, New York: Fidelio Trio

Julian Anderson Forthcoming performances The Discovery of Heaven 30.9.20, Royal Festival Hall, London: London Philharmonic Orchestra/ John Storgårds

Listening, Composing and Culture Musicologist and critic Christopher Dingle has collaborated with Anderson on a book of conversations.

Dialogues on Listening, Composing and Culture will be published by Boydell & Brewer in Summer 2020 and contains wide-ranging discussions across many subjects, from Anderson’s own work to his diverse musical interests, as well as broader cultural issues.

PHOTOS: TOM COULT © MAURICE FOXALL; JULIAN ANDERSON © MAURICE FOXALL

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Carl Davis Forthcoming performances

Carl Davis

One Week

Ballets across America

French premiere 2-3.4.20, Théâtre Ledoux: Orchestre Victor Hugo Franche-Comté

With American ballet companies announcing their 20/21 seasons, Davis’ prominence in the field has been confirmed, with several of his scores scheduled for highprofile performances. His colourful and engaging Aladdin, with choreography by David Bintley, will be staged by Houston Ballet, whilst Alice in Wonderland appears in both Tulsa and Pittsburgh with choreography by Derek Dean.

8.5.20, Tishman Auditorium, New York: The CoPA Theater Orchestra (Mannes School of Music)

Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio 26.4.20, Palais des Congres, Perpignan: Perpignan Mediteranee Communaute Urbaine/Daniel Tosi 2.5.20, Auditorio Manuel de Falla, Granada: Coro Millenium/Orquesta Filarmonía/Ricardo Espigares

The Adventurer/The Immigrant French premiere 5-6.5.20, Lille; 7.5.20, Aire-sur-laLys: Orchestre National de Lille/ Adrian Prabava

The Iron Mask/The Adventurer 9.5.20, Philharmonie Luxembourg: Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg/Carl Davis CBE

Chaplin, The Tramp 23.5.20, 27.6.20, Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava: Orchestra of the Slovak National Theatre/Dušan Štefánek/chor. Daniel de Andrade

The Great Gatsby 5-7.2.21, Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Denver: Colorado Ballet/chor.

Jorden Morris

Alice in Wonderland 26-28.3.21, Tulsa Performing Arts Center: Tulsa Ballet/Peter Wilson/ chor. Derek Deane 7-16.5.21, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre: Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre/chor.

Derek Deane

Aladdin 10-20.6.21, Wortham Theater Center, Houston: Houston Ballet/chor.

David Bintley

Peter Sculthorpe Forthcoming performances

Harold Lloyd: a comic genuis Faber Music is pleased to announce a new agreement with The Harold Lloyd Estate whereby we can now supply digital (Blu Ray) prints of Lloyd’s silent movies for use in conjunction with Carl Davis’ much loved scores. As a result, presenting these comic masterpieces from the golden era of cinema has never been easier!

Perhaps the most popular of Lloyd’s titles, the classic romantic comedy Safety Last! is regularly performed worldwide, a testament to both the genius of Lloyd and Carl Davis’ inventive score. Lloyd’s movies frequently contained ‘thrill sequences’ of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats, and this 1923 masterpiece is no different: Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street is one of the most enduring images in cinema. The orchestration of Davis’ 74-minute score is based on the line-up of the Paul Whiteman Band (22 players), and is inspired by the popular music of the 1920s.

Davis’ score to another Lloyd classic An Eastern Westerner has the same orchestration, meaning that the two films can be run as a double bill.

Earth Cry/Sun Song 20.3.20, Royal College of Music, London: RCM Students/Nicolo Foron

From Uluru 21.3.20, Grainger Studio, Adelaide: Adelaide Symphony Orchestra/ Graham Abbott

New silent movie scores Davis is currently at work on two new live cinema scores: The Son of the Sheikh (1926) an adventure/drama directed

by George Fitzmaurice and starring Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Bánky, and The Scarecrow (1920) a 22-minute two-reel silent comedy starring Buster Keaton. More details will follow in the next issue.

Peter Sculthorpe Earth Cry This year sees a great focus on Peter Sculthorpe’s music at both ends of the globe. In Australia, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra are giving six performances of Kakadu in April; Canberra Chamber Orchestra perform Jabiru Dreaming and Third Sonata for Strings at the National Portrait Gallery in March; as well as four performances of Earth Cry by Australian Youth Orchestra, Symphony Central Coast, the Melbourne Symphony and Melbourne Youth Orchestra. On the other side of the world, the UK sees two further performances of Earth Cry by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Cardiff and another by the Royal College of Music, London where it was paired with Sun Song.

The RCM concert has a particularly touching resonance: it was a charity event to raise funds for the Australian bushfires that have devastated the country for months.

Sculthorpe was deeply influenced by the landscape and Aboriginal culture of Australia, and used allusions to Aboriginal modes, ritual elements and the didjeridu in Earth Cry to highlight the need to care for the world we live in. The 11-minute work from 1986 is filled with mesmerising, gradually shifting landscapes, as well as fiercely violent sections of percussion and didjeridu, which together create the unique and exciting Sculthorpe soundworld.

Earth Cry 26.3.20, ABC Southbank Centre, Melbourne: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Bochner 29.3.20, Melbourne Recital Centre: Melbourne Youth Orchestra/ Brett Kelly 24.4.20, BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff: BBC National Orchestra of Wales/ Jessica Cottis

Kakadu 1.4.20, Seymour Centre, Sydney: Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Gordon Hamilton

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In Denver, Colorado Ballet will present Davis’ The Great Gatsby with choreography by Jorden Morris. Davis wrote this score, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant fable of hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America, for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre in 2019. In his music, Davis conjures both the shimmering Jazz Age and the destructive obsession which forces Gatsby’s world to unravel. It has been so successful that he is now creating a Great Gatsby Suite for orchestra.

PHOTO: CARL DAVIS © JASPER FRY; STILL FROM HAROLD LLOYD’S SAFETY LAST!

TUNING IN

Martin Suckling

Martin Suckling Selected forthcoming performances

Orchestral recordings In February the BBC Philharmonic and Ilan Volkov recorded Suckling’s latest orchestral work, This Departing Landscape, for release on a portrait disc from NMC Records. A concert premiere has been scheduled in 20/21.

Just days after the sessions in Manchester, Volkov recorded Suckling’s concertos for flute and piano with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Shortlisted last year for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco’s prestigious Musical Composition Prize, the 14-minute flute concerto was performed by the soloist for whom it was written: Katherine Bryan. Tamara Stefanovich was the soloist in the Piano Conceto, a dazzling 26-minute work comprising six hugely contrasting movements.

Songs unlock the magic of Donaghy Five new songs by Suckling, entitled The Tuning were premiered by Marta Fontanals-Simmons and Christopher Glynn at the Oxford Lieder Festival on 19 October 2019.

Commissioned by the Oxford Lieder Festival, they all set poems by Michael Donaghy. The songs have since been shortlisted in the Scottish Awards for New Music.

‘Wistful settings of verbally virtuosic yet thoughtful poems, in a lyrical arioso recitative… always accessible... I hope to hear this lovely mezzo sing them again in the future.’

The Sunday Times (Hugh Canning), 27 October 2019

‘The musicality of Donaghy’s poetry is often remarked upon, and perhaps this is what drew me to his texts’ writes Suckling. ‘It’s a musicality that is more than just pervasive lyricism, one that extends to his precision of gesture and cadence and a delight in the union of formal elegance with expressive heft. But I think what I love is the magic, and with it the making-strange, whether of poem-as-spell or of a seemingly quotidian observation. The magic holds me.’

The five poems in the set are selected from across Donaghy’s output and are unrelated. They are not intended to present a coherent narrative, nor are they a cycle – though the music offers cyclic elements, and a narrative could be constructed if desired. ‘I chose them because I could hear them sung as I read them’ explains Suckling. ‘With the exception of ‘The Tuning’, whose exposition-heavy text required a different approach – I set them as songs: simple, often strophic vocal lines and a piano part focusing on a single figuration, as in classic Lieder.’

After an extended introduction, ‘The Present’ places cycling pairs of vocal phrases against ever-expanding piano descents. ‘The River in Spate’ and ‘Tears’ both offer types of musical near-suspended animation. In ‘The Tuning’ the piano takes the melodic lead, sinuous counterpoint enveloping the narrator’s arioso. ‘Two Spells for Sleeping’ practices a hypnotism of unceasing pulsation and notquite-repeating loops.

PHOTO: MARTIN SUCKLING © SARA PORTER

Mediation (after Donne) 18.6.20, Paisley Abbey; 19.6.20, Castle Douglas; 20.6.20, Selkirk: Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Nicolas Altstaedt

Her Lullaby world premiere 1.7.20, Royal Academy of Music, London: Julie Park

This Departing Landscape world premiere TBA, Manchester: BBC Philharmonic

Her Lullaby Her Lullaby, a new work for solo viola, written for the Royal Academy of Music in celebration of their 200th anniversary, will be premiered in London this July by RAM student Julie Park.

‘For several years, every night I would sing to my young children, sometimes for hours,’ says Suckling, explaining the ideas behind his 14-minute piece. ‘Folksongs, songs made up on the spot, verse after verse, anything that could maintain a calm continuity of circling sound… And then the children didn’t need the songs anymore. Which was in many ways a relief, but really I miss that calm timeless space of song gentling the night. The deep listening required of the solo performer in Her Lullaby – pitching the justly-tuned intervals, allowing the harmonies to fuse in the body of the instrument, finding the right durations for each sound – alongside the strophe-by-strophe nearimprovised extension of the melody recall for me those special times I spent with my children when they were very young, singing them across the border from wakefulness to sleep.’

Melding joy and grief The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with whom Suckling was Associate Composer from 2013-18, will tour his Meditation (after Donne) for chamber orchestra and electronics this summer. Nicolas Altstaedt conducts.

Commissioned as part of the WWI Centenary commemorations, the 11-minute work takes as its inspiration the massed ringing of bells as Armistice was declared. Suckling describes it as ‘a simple song for orchestra, with performers and audience surrounded by a constantly evolving tapestry of tolling bell sounds’. His description, however, underplays the skill with which he takes these plain elements and creates something richly poetic from them: an engaging and immediate work that at the same time perfectly captures the strange combination of joy and grief that the end of the war brought about.

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Francisco Coll Forthcoming performances

Francisco Coll

Hyperlude V

Revisiting and recording an opus 1

26.3.20, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa: Augustin Hadelich

A new version of Coll’s adventurous opus 1, Aqua Cinerea, will feature on a new all-Coll orchestral disc from the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Gustavo Gimeno. The newly-revised work will receive its first concert performances in January 2021, with Gimeno conducting the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Brass Quintet US premiere 14.4.20, New York University: The Wallace Collection

Lilith*/Turia *world premiere 7.5.20, Palau de la Música, Valencia: Jacob Kellermann/Orquesta de Valencia/*Francisco Coll/Christian Karlsen

The OPL portrait disc will also include Mural and Hidd’n Blue, as well as the Violin Concerto and Four Iberian Miniatures, both with Patricia Kopatchinskaja as soloist.

Violin Concerto Dutch premiere 23.5.20, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam: Patricia Kopatchinskaja/ Netherlands Radio Philharmonic/ Gustavo Gimeno UK premiere 11.3.21, Barbican Hall, London: Patricia Kopatchinskaja/London Symphony Orchestra/FrançoisXavier Roth

Mural French premiere 17.7.20, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; 18.7.20, Montpellier: Mediterranean Youth Orchestra/Duncan Ward

Aqua Cinerea North American premiere 6,9.1.21, Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto: Toronto Symphony Orchestra/ Gustavo Gimeno

Turia Israeli premiere 9.1.21, Tel Aviv; 10.1.21, Jerusalem: Israel Contemporary Players/Jacob Kellermann/Christian Karlsen US and UK premieres 6.4.21, Green Umbrella, Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles; 22.5.21: Barbican Hall, London: Jacob Kellermann Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group/Thomas Adès

Four Iberian Miniatures 6-8.5.21, Davis Symphony Hall, San Francisco: Noa Wildschut/San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/ James Gaffigan

French premiere of Mural Following performances by the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Orquesta de València, Joven Orquesta Nacional de España, and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (who together with Thomas Adès presented it at the BBC Proms), Francisco Coll’s audacious orchestral work Mural will receive its French premiere this summer, with the Mediterranean Youth Orchestra conducted by Duncan Ward. The orchestra – who previously tackled Coll’s 4-minute Hidd’n Blue back in 2014 – will present the work in Montpellier and at the Festival d’Aix-enProvence.

Premiered in 2016, this daring 24-minute work is an extraordinary achievement, handling vast forces with an impressive single-mindedness to create five movements of stark and unsettling poetry. The catalyst for the piece was hearing Claudio Abbado conducting Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony in Lucerne. ‘This provided the shock that I need always to start a work,’ explains Coll. ‘Right after, I hurried home and wrote the harmonies which begin the piece. Usually I never start a piece from the beginning, however the first bars of Mural are the bars that I wrote that day.’

A high-profile German premiere of Mural will be announced in late April.

A new Brass Quintet In November, Stockholm Chamber Brass premiered Coll’s Brass Quintet in St Andrews as part of the University’s Fringe of Gold Festival. The composer, a trombonist himself, has created a kaleidoscopic work in five movements: Prologue, Chorale, Fanfares, Canzona, and Sequence.

The Wallace Collection – who co-commissioned the 20-minute quintet and will record it for release on their own label – will give its US premiere in April at New York University.

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PHOTO: FRANCISCO COLL © JUDITH COLL

Meanwhile, a second recording of Mural – from the Joven Orquesta Nacional de España and Cristóbal Soler – is also in production, as is a recording of the Double Concerto Les Plaisirs Illuminés, conducted by Coll and featuring Kopatchinskaja, Sol Gabetta, and Camerata Bern.

Turia in LA, London, and on disc Turia, Coll’s five-movement concerto for guitar and ensemble of seven players will receive its US and UK premieres next season, with guitarist Jacob Kellermann and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group conducted

by Thomas Adès. The 18-minute work takes its name from the dried-up river in Valencia which now hosts gardens, fountains, cafés, and an opera house by architect Santiago Calatrava.

‘As a child,’ Coll explains, ‘I used to walk in this unusual river, full of light, flowers and people. I always thought that one day I would write the music of this river. When I was approached with this commission, I immediately knew that this was my opportunity to write a piece for guitar and ensemble with Spanish luminosity. This soundscape evokes the light and the respective shadows of my country.’

Flamenco is very much in the fabric of this work, although it is always filtered through Coll’s distinctive sonorous imagination.

Kellermann has recorded the work for release on BIS records where it will be paired with the Rodrigo concerto.

Christian Karlsen conducts Norrbotten NEO (Coll) and the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Rodrigo).

Lilith Coll’s time as Composer in Residence with the Orquesta de València will culminate in May with the premiere of a new orchestral piece, Lilith.

Coll himself will conduct the 11-minute work which, like so much of his music, traverses dynamic and registral extremes. A dark, brooding soundscape is flecked with an array of tuned percussion and two pianos tuned a quartertone apart.

The concert in May will also include a performance of Turia conducted by Christian Karlsen.

TUNING IN

John Woolrich

Benjamin Britten

Trumpet Concerto for Alison Balsom

Death in Venice at Covent Garden

From Ulysses Awakes, his iconic reworking of Monteverdi, to his much-loved Viola Concerto, John Woolrich has consistently made his own work a fascinating echo chamber for musical voices from the past. In May a new work for trumpet and chamber orchestra – Hark! the echoing air – will be premiered by Alison Balsom and the Britten Sinfonia. The new commission will be heard alongside Woolrich’s characterful, pungent transcriptions of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas.

Folkestone New Music A former Artistic Director of Dartington and of the Aldeburgh Festival, Woolrich can always be relied on to devise richly imaginative concerts. His latest programming venture is Folkestone New Music where, in March, oboist Melinda Maxwell performed Woolrich’s Three Capriccios and pianist Clare Hammond presented her ‘Ghosts and Whispers’ project.

The latter comprises a sequence of fragments, elegies and absences by the likes of Schubert, Janáček, Jaquet de la Guerre and Schumann which are interleaved with Woolrich’s Pianobooks. The programme, which will be reprised in Cambridge this October, is performed alongside a specially commissioned film by the Quay Brothers.

Responses to Tinguely In November, Jo Cole directed the Royal Academy of Music String Orchestra in Woolrich’s It is Midnight, Dr. Schweitzer. This work for eleven players comprises eleven fragments, each taking its title from the work of Jean Tinguely. ‘I am haunted by Tinguely’s 1959 lecture at the ICA,’ writes Woolrich, who has written several works inspired by the Swiss artist’s kinetic sculptural machines.

The most recent piece to reference the work of Tinguely is Woolrich’s 11-minute Débricollage. Premiered in Birmingham by the Bozzini Quartet in March 2019, it is the fifth in an ongoing sequence of string quartets entitled A Book of Inventions. In January the Ruisi Quartet gave the premiere of the latest instalment – Scherzi di fantasia – at Moscow State University.

PHOTOS: JOHN WOOLRICH © MAURICE FOXALL; DEATH IN VENICE AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN

In November The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden staged its first production in 25 years of Benjamin Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice. David McVicar directed, with Mark Padmore giving a tour de force performance as Aschenbach.

‘Now bathed in sunlight, now plunged into morbid shadow, the Royal Opera House’s new production is hard to fault. At a glance, it exposes the opposing forces tugging at Britten’s last opera: youth and age, health and sickness, head and heart…

This uneasy work is rendered unmissable by its glittering, restless score, rich with gongs and bells, piano and harp, conducted with clarity and perception by Farnes. Death in Venice may well have represented the unleashing of a lifetime’s repressed feelings, yet Britten’s vision was wider, more ambitious: it’s about the essence of art itself. McVicar has honoured this with a production overflowing with pathos and sympathy.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 1 December 2019

‘You can follow every twist in the story by following the myriad ways in which Britten uses the orchestra… under Farnes’ baton this score is delivered as if it is chamber music writ large: every nuance, every ethereal wisp and ominous discord is delineated… You will not encounter a finer performance of this autumnal masterpiece.’

The Times (Richard Morrison), 25 November 2019

‘What a haunted, strange and difficult opera Death in Venice is… it offers no easy consolation: the struggle between the objective appreciation of aesthetic beauty and the urge to let rip in physical orgy remains unresolved in the bleak final scenes… for its unsparing emotional honesty and wise beauty, it surely ranks as one of the masterpieces of a creative artist’s old age… an artistic achievement of rare intensity and high accomplishment.’

John Woolrich Forthcoming performances Pianobooks II, VI, VII, IX, XII, XIV, XV 31.10.20, Homerton College, Cambridge: Clare Hammond

A Farewell 23.3.20, St James’s Piccadilly, London: Trio Alma

Three Capriccios 29.3.20, The Glassworks, Folkestone: Melinda Maxwell

Hark! the echoing air/Scarlatti – Sonatas Set 2 14.5.20, Milton Court, London; 15.5.20, Norfolk and Norwich Festival; 16.5.20, Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden: Alison Balsom/ Britten Sinfonia

Benjamin Britten Forthcoming performances Curlew River 26.3.20, Milton Court, London; 27.3.20, Norwich; 28.3.20, Saffron Walden: Bostridge/Riches/Davies/ Britten Sinfonia Voices/Britten Sinfonia/Eamonn Dougan/dir. Martin Fitzpatrick

Death in Venice 9-30.5.20, Opernhaus, Stuttgart: Staatsoper Stuttgart/Bas Wiegers/ dir.Demis Volpi 16.5-25.6.20, Theater Münster: Theater Münster/Golo Berg/dir.

Carlos Wagner 24.5-24.6, Beethoven Orchester Bonn/Hermes Helfricht/dir. Hermann Schneider

The Telegraph (Rupert Christiansen), 22 November 2019

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Jonathan Harvey Forthcoming performances

Jonathan Harvey

Pre-echo for JeanGuihen

A second recording of Song Offerings

4.4.20, Milton Court, London: JeanGuihen Queyras

The Riot Ensemble and Aaron Holloway Nahum have released a new recording of Harvey’s Song Offerings for voice and chamber ensemble of eight players, with soprano Sara Dacey.

Bird Concerto with Pianosong 17.4.20, TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht 28.4.20, De Link, Tilburg: Laura Sandee/Ensemble Insomnio/ Ulrich Pohl

Premiered in 1985, Song Offerings remains one of Harvey’s most celebrated works. Paul Griffiths, writing in the New York Times, described it as ‘an extended instant of joy, a marriage of sensuousness and calm.’ An intimate cycle of four ecstatic Tagore poems, this 17-minute work abounds in exotic colours, torrents of gleaming effects and masterful word setting.

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco 19.4.20, Festival Mixtur, Barcelona

Song of June 31.5.20, Alwinton Church, UK: Scottish Vocal Ensemble/Mark Hindley

Tendril 8.6.20, Kammermusiksaal, Mannheim: Ensemble Incontro

String Quartet No.2 11.6.20, Salle des Concerts, Cité de la musique, Paris: Quatuor Béla

Torsten Rasch Forthcoming performances Die andere Frau world premiere 3-24.6.20, Semperoper Dresden, Germany: Marquardt/Herlitzius/ Pucalkova/Deyhim/Sinfoniechor Dresden/Staatskapelle Dresden/ Roland Kluttig/dir. Immo Karaman

A Chaconne fusing East and West In January Jonathan Harvey’s final work for ensemble, Sringāra Chaconne for 15 players (2009), made a strong impression when it was revived by the London Sinfonietta.

This 14-minute work, full of ravishing, glittering textures conjured from four gentle chords which rise slowly through many transmutations, is a typical example the composer’s fusion of Western culture and Eastern philosophy. There are a number of more objective events which repeat – like the chaconne of the title – whilst Sringāra is an Indian rasa (‘flavour or mood’) signifying a love-essence which, according to Hindu belief, is at the beginning of all art.

‘Harvey’s astonishing Sringara Chaconne, rooted in Buddhist spirituality, unfolded like the repetitions of a mantra, contemplating the unity of the cosmos in the sensuous immediacy of sound.’

The Guardian (Tim Ashley), 23 January 2020

‘Dizzying, sensuous and joyful panache… music of spiritual purpose but still with a human face.’

The Times (Geoff Brown), 24 January 2020

Nature’s Composers First heard in 2001, Harvey’s Bird Concerto with Pianosong has become one of the composer’s most iconic works. the The 30-minute piece is scored for piano, ensemble of 17 players and live electronics. ‘If the songs and objects of the score can bring some inkling of how it might feel to be a human in the mind of a bird, or vice-versa’ wrote Harvey, ‘then I would be happy.’

Recent months have seen performances in the Netherlands – where Ensemble Insomnio and Ulrich Pohl are touring the work with soloist Laura Sandee – and at the Strasbourg Musica festival, where Bertrand Chamayou was joined by the Orchestre national de Metz under David Reiland.

For the Strasbourg performance Sound Intermedia, who worked closely with Harvey on several performances of the work, created a new more practical version of the electronic element.

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PHOTO: JONATHAN HARVEY © J. SHIRCLIFF

Torsten Rasch A new opera for Dresden The unique expressive make-up of Rasch’s music – his fluency, assurance on the largest scale, and his uncanny ability to spin a vivid and personal sound-world around the ghosts of others – makes him a natural composer for the stage. His first opera Rotter (2007) was adapted from a play by the East German dissident writer Thomas Brasch, whilst a second, The Duchess of Malfi (2010), saw him join forces with the radical theatre company Punchdrunk for a critically acclaimed immersive adaptation of John Webster’s gripping revenge tragedy. Die Formel – an ambitious interdisciplinary work for singers, actors and orchestra – followed last year at Konzerttheater Bern.

Rasch is now at work on his next opera: Die Andere Frau for the Semperoper Dresden. To a libretto by writer Helmut Krausser exploring the biblical story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, the work will offer an exciting love story and trace the origins of the Abrahamic religions. Opening in June 2020, Immo Karaman’s production will literally place the audience in the middle of the action: on the stage of the Semperoper itself. Roland Kluttig conducts.

TUNING IN

Carl Vine

Matthew Hindson

Carl Vine Selected forthcoming performances Piano Sonata No.4 16.4.20, Melbourne Recital Centre; 2.5.20, University of Singapore: Lindsay Garritson

Sonata for Piano Four Hands 26.6.20, Kunstmuseum Reutlingen: Michael Hagemann/Shoko Hayashizaki

Melbourne commissions Hindson has been commissioned to write a 15-minute chamber work for the Melbourne Ensemble, a new initiative formed of members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The new work will be scored for the same mixed line-up as the Beethoven op.20 Septet.

Percussion Symphony in Canberra With his eight symphonies, spanning thirty two years of creativity, Carl Vine has made a sizeable contribution to the genre. From they offer a fascinating insight into his development as a composer, from his latest, The Enchanted Loom (2018), to an ecstatic celebration of the power of the human community in his Choral Symphony (No.6, 1996).

In his Fifth Symphony, from 1995, the orchestra is joined by four concertante percussionists. A three movement work, with a heavily rhythmic opening and Tarantella finale bookending an extended slow movement.

This thrilling 22-minute was most recently heard in March in a performance by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra conducted Nicholas Milton. Back in 2012, the symphony was choreographed by Terence Kohler for the Perth Festival and it is easy to hear why this dynamic score would have attracted dance.

Piano Sontata No.4 American pianist Lindsay Garritson has continued her worldwide premiere of Vine’s Fourth Piano Sonata with performances at the Melbourne Recital Centre and London’s Royal College of Music. She has the exclusive right to perform the 15-minute work until mid-2020. The next perfomance will be at the Esplanade Recital Studio, Singapore on 2 May.

Inner World Umberto Clerici will perform Vine’s Inner World for cello and audio at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra in July. This thrilling work is a 13-minute hall of mirrors in which the soloist is enveloped in a shroud of prerecorded cello sound: dissected, crystallized, modified and re-arranged. With several commercial recordings and advocates including Steven Isserlis and Nicolas Altstaedt, Inner World makes a spectacular showcase for the adventurous cellist interested in exploring the realm of electronics.

PHOTO: CARL VINE © KEITH SAUNDERS

Meanwhile, Hindson has also been commissioned to write a work for solo snare drum. Hey! will be the test piece for the Melbourne Symphony’s 2020 Snare Drum Award, which takes place on 26 May.

Concerto headlines bushfire concert Hindson’s Violin Concerto No.1 Australian Postcards was the centrepiece of a benefit concert given by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in February. Emily Sun was the soloist, and Tianyi Lu conducted. The concert was broadcast live on ABC Classic FM. Hindson’s concerto has been commercially recorded twice and continues to prove to be a firm favourite with performers and audience alike.

Dangerous Creatures

Inner World 23.7.20, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra: Umberto Clerici

Matthew Hindson Selected forthcoming performances Flash 27.3.20, Bowral Autumn Music Festival, NSW: Claire Edwardes

Nothing is Forever 29.3.20, Nowra School of Arts; 5.4.20, Bowral Memorial Hall: Kyle Little/Steel City Strings

Requiem for a City 3.4.20, Royce Hall, University of California, Los Angeles: UCLA Wind Ensemble/Travis Cross German premiere 16.5.20, Konzertsaal FWSK, Berlin: Junges Ensemble Berlin

Technologic 145 1-2.5.20, Chelmsford, MA: Commonwealth Orchestra Outreach Project/Lucinda Ellert

Dangerous Creatures is Hindson’s modern-day take on Saint-Saens’ much-loved Carnival of Animals. The orchestral suite features depictions of a variety of fearsome animals such as ants, rhinoceros, scorpions, jellyfish, and even humans! Commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, it has since been taken up by all the major Australian orchestras, often in educational contexts as it provides an ideal introduction to the orchestra for young listeners. Last year it was revisited by the Melbourne Symphony, with 6 concerts in Hamer Hall and a tour of the reduced version throughout Victoria. And in July this year, the Queensland Symphony Orchestra take up the work with 4 concerts in Brisbane.

Hey!

Requiem for a City taken up in USA

World premiere

Co-composed with Australia’s foremost DJ, Paul Mac, Requiem for a City explores the death of late-night dance culture in some urban environments (such as Sydney’s Oxford St), due to the regulation and gentrification of the city. Premiered in 2015 by the Sydney Conservatorium Wind Orchestra under John Lynch, who since recorded it on Naxos, the 13-minute work has also been taken up by groups in Australia and Spain. And it’s now gained admirers in the USA, with performances in Sioux Falls (SD) and Los Angeles in recent months. In May it receives its German premiere in Berlin.

World premiere 26.5.20, ABC Southbank Centre, Melbourne: TBA

The Rave and the Nightingale 4.6.20, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen: Göttingen Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Milton

Dangerous Creatures 29-30.7.20, Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, Brisbane: Queensland Symphony Orchestra

Maestro 15.10.20, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra: Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble/Daryl Pratt

LiteSPEED 4-5.11.20, Australian National University, Canberra: Canberra Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Milton

String Quartet No.3: Ngeringa 13.11.20, Ukaria Cultural Centre, Mt Barker Summit: Australian String Quartet

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Colin Matthews Selected forthcoming performances

Colin Matthews The Great Journey

Hidden Agenda

In July, the Three Choirs Festival will present a rare performance of Matthews’ narrative for baritone and ensemble The Great Journey. Roderick Williams will join members of the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Adrian Partington.

31.3.20, Wigmore Hall, London: London Bridge Trio

Debussy – Symphony in B Minor (Finale) 24-25.4.20, Edmonton, Canada: Edmonton Symphony Orchestra/ José-Luis Gomez

Based around the story of the conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who between 1527 and 1536 was lost in the interior of Central America, much of the work is communicated through dramatic recitative. The piece is laced with evocative fragments of sixteenth-century music, which Matthews deftly weaves into the sonic fabric.

Pluto, the renewer 28.4,2.5.20, Lichfield Cathedral: Lichfield Musical Youth Theatre

Mahler – “Nicht zu schnell” from Piano Quartet 15,17.5.20, TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht: Radio Filharmonisch Orkest/Klaus Mäkelä

Seascapes world premiere 13.6.20, Aldeburgh Festival; 27.4.21, Wigmore Hall, London: Claire Booth/ Nash Ensemble/Martyn Brabbins

The Great Journey 28.7.20, Three Choirs Festival, Worcester Cathedral: Roderick Williams/Adrian Partington/members of the Philharmonia Orchestra

Debussy – Preludes: Les collines d’Anacapri, Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest, La cathédrale engloutie, Bruyères 20-21.11.20, Whitney Hall, Louisville: Louisville Orchestra/Teddy Abrams/ Alasdair Neale

Seascapes I see a black time coming, history Tending in footnotes our forgotten land Seascapes, a new work for soprano and nine players, will be premiered at the 2020 Aldeburgh Festival by Claire Booth and the Nash Ensemble conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

The 12-minute work sets four poems by Sidney Keyes – a remarkable writer who was killed in action in 1943 at the age of just twenty. All but one of the poems Matthews sets were written in the last year of Keyes’ life, after he had enlisted but before he saw active service, and they are pervaded by a dark, foreboding mood. ‘Keyes is probably best known through Tippett’s settings of The Heart’s Assurance and Remember Your Lovers,’ remarks Matthews, ‘but his Collected Poems (a volume of little more than 100 pages) reveal a remarkably sophisticated perspective, heavily influenced by Rilke and Yeats but demonstrating an exceptional, individual voice, brutally cut short. Vita Sackville-West wrote of “the astonishing maturity of his mind, the intense seriousness of his outlook, and his innate pre-occupation with major things”.’

Mäkelä conducts Mahler arrangement On 15 May rising star Klaus Mäkelä will conduct Matthews’ orchestration of Mahler’s early piano quartet movement with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.

Commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2009 and taking its cue from the sweeping gestures and oppressive mood of the original, this vivid reimagining intensifies the ominous atmosphere of what is a fascinating 12-minute work, creating savagely seething climaxes on a grand scale.

Few composers are better placed to have made such an orchestration than Matthews who, together with his brother David, collaborated with Deryck Cooke on a performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony.

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PHOTO: COLIN MATTHEWS © MAURICE FOXALL

This bold and dramatic work – around 50 minutes in total – remains one of Matthews’ most substantial statements. It is almost 25 years since it was last performed in its entirety, although Fuga, a thrilling instrumental version of the third part, is regularly programmed.

A moving tribute recorded Intensely expressive, and driven by an urgent lyrical impulse, Matthews’ Postludes for oboe octet has been released on NMC. The performers are Nicholas Daniel and the Britten Sinfonia, who premiered this substantial piece at London’s Wigmore Hall in 2019.

The 16-minute work is dedicated to the memory of Oliver Knussen and is scored for oboe (doubling cor anglais), string trio and string quartet. A searing Prelude is followed by an ‘Elegaic Intermezzo’ for oboe and string trio alone.

Next, the music opens out into a Barcarolle, with the cor anglais reserved for a plangent Epilogue.

‘Beautiful but muscular, it opens with drone-like attack, full of whirring and liquid string effects, then shifts down a gear late on, when cor anglais replaces oboe in touching elegy.’

The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 7 February 2019

TUNING IN

Anders Hillborg

Anders Hillborg Forthcoming performances

Mantra – Elegy in Amsterdam The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has just announced two performances of Mantra – Elegy, Hillborg’s 7-minute homage to Stravinsky, in May 2021. Kristiina Poska will conduct.

This concise and eventful work expands upon two emblematic chords from The Rite of Spring, transforming them into something entirely new and original. Premiered

by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2018, the work was co-commisioned by the Aspen Festival.

A concerto for Nicolas Altstaedt

Sound Atlas Praised for its ‘alluring soundscapes’ by the Evening Standard after its world premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Marin Alsop in 2019, Anders Hillborg’s Sound Atlas will receive its US premiere in November, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic. Anyone familiar with Hillborg’s music will no doubt remember one of his trademark textures: gleaming, unearthly string harmonies lit from within by glass harmonica. In the past, Hillborg has created this beguiling effect with just a few individual glasses but in this work he employs all three octaves of this extraordinary instrument to great effect.

Co-commissioned by the London Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the Göteborgs Symfoniker, the 21-minute work sets up a glistening microtonal sound world in its first two movements ‘Crystalline’ and ‘River of Glass’ before the evocatively titled ‘Vaporised Toy Pianos’. The music’s crystalline character then fades away as the music plunges into ‘Vortex’ – a soundscape of violent, whirling, convulsive masses of sound – before finally resolving in an achingly beautiful ‘Hymn’ for strings which concludes the piece.

Rap Notes causes a scandal!

A rare performance of Hillborg’s Rap Notes, by Andrzej Boreyko and Orkiestra Symfoniczna Filharmonii Narodowej, caused quite a stir in Warsaw last October.

Scored for three rappers, coloratura soprano and orchestra, this madcap 12-minute work shows Hillborg at his most irreverent and eclectic.

‘Scandal at the Philharmonic… Some people left – those who remained cheered… The style of music, unprecedented in this respectable hall, at first aroused disbelief and slight consternation…

Those who remained for the work’s entity became more and more convinced by it – particularly with entrance of the Queen of the Night’s Aria. The combination of rap and opera was fascinating.’

There’s no doubt that Hillborg seems to have an intuitive knack for getting the most out of his soloists, be it Martin Fröst in the now iconic Clarinet Concerto ‘Peacock Tales’, or Pekka Kuusisto in Bach Materia, an inventive and zany companion piece to Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, which is currently being toured by the St Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Hillborg’s next concerto will be for cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and has been commissioned by Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Münchner Philharmoniker, Cello Biennale Amsterdam, Antwerp Symphony, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Quebec Symphony Orchestra, with the kind support of Margarit Jacobs.

The concerto will be premiered in October 2020 by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and Fabien Gabel, who will also present the work in Amsterdam.

Other upcoming projects include a Viola Concerto for Lawrence Power, to be premiered in the 21/22 season, and a substantial new work for ensemble.

Music as surrealist collage

Bach Materia 26.3-15.5.20, Stillwater and St Paul, MN; 16.5.20, Lincoln Center, New York: Pekka Kuusisto/St. Paul Chamber Orchestra

Six Pieces for Wind Quintet 19.4.20, St John’s Episcopal Church, Washington, DC: Imani Winds

Peacock Tales (original version) 23.4.20, Ostrava; 24.4.20, Žilina: Karel Dohnal/Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Popelka

Hyper Exit 9.5.20, Musikaliska, Stockholm: Magnus Holmander/Östgöta Blåsarsymfoniker

The Breathing of the World 10.6.20, St Jacobs Kyrka, Stockholm: Filip Graden/Theo Hillborg/St Jakobs Chamber Choir/Gary Graden

Sound Atlas US premiere 6,8.11.20: Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles: LA Philharmonic Orchestra/ Esa-Pekka Salonen

Exquisite Corpse 25-28.2.21, Severance Hall, Cleveland: Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst

New work for cello and orchestra world premiere 23.10.20, Koningin Elisabethzaal, Antwerp; 25.10.20, Amsterdam Cello Biennale: Nicolas Altstaedt/Antwerp Symphony Orchestra/Fabien Gabel

Mantra – Elegy Dutch premiere 7,9.5.21, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Kristiina Poska

Following recent performances by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Alan Gilbert, Hillborg’s thrilling orchestral piece Exquisite Corpse has been taken up by The Cleveland Orchestra, who will perform it under Franz Welser-Möst in February 2021. The 14-minute work took its name from the surrealist parlour game where multiple artists would contribute sections to a drawing, with the bizarre composite image only revealed at the end of the process.

Familiar musical objects melt and buckle in what one critic described as the sonic equivalent of one of Dali’s paintings: material from Hillborg’s own work butts up against a chord from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, a salute to Ligeti and, towards the end, a passage from Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, barely visible through a mist of strings.

Like the Sibelius Symphony (with which it makes an ideal partner in concert programmes), Exquisite Corpse was commissioned by the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra who recorded it with Alan Gilbert for one of Hillborg’s several portrait discs on the BIS label.

Polska (Wojciech Rogacin), 6 October 2019

PHOTO: ANDERS HILLBORG © MATS LUNDQVIST

21

NEW WORKS Stage Works TOM COULT Violet (2019) opera for four singers and ensemble of 13 players. 85 mins. Text: Alice Birch (English) VIOLET (S)/FELIX (BBar)/LAURA (M)/CLOCKKEEPER (T)/DINERS, HOST, MORRIS, JUDY (non-singing roles) fl(=picc, chromatic pitch pipe + dog clicker).2 cl(I=ebcl, bcl + dog clicker, II=cbcl) - tpt(=kalimba).trbn - perc(1): glsp/ vib/t.bells/mar/2 bongos/2 tom-toms, large or medium BD/tam-t/clave/wdbl/tpl.bl/guiro/2 mcas/2 non-identical mechanical metronomes - harp(=violin pitch pipe) - 2 vln(both=dog clicker).2 vla(both=dog clicker).vlc.db(4th string extension, =guitar pitch pipe).

FP: 13.6.2020, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, UK: Music Theatre Wales/Andrew Gourlay.

Commissioned by Music Theatre Wales, Snape Maltings and Theater Magdeburg.

Full score, vocal score and parts in preparation

TORSTEN RASCH Die andere Frau (2019) opera in 10 scenes. 100 mins. Text: Helmut Krausser (German) Abram(BBar)/Sarai(S)/Hagar(M)/3 Angels(CT/T/B)/The Eyewitness(female vocalist) 3(II=afl, III=picc).2(II=ca).2.bcl.tsax.bsax.2.cbsn - 4.3.3.1 - timp - perc(3): glsp/vib/mar/t.bells/crot/4 tom toms/handle cast/singing bowl/5 tpl.bl/2 ch.cym/2 susp.cym/3 tam-t/4 tuned gongs/BD - harp - cel - strings (12.10.8.6.4(2 with 5th string B)) - pre-recorded electronics.

FP: 3.6.2020, Semperoper Dresden, Germany: Evelyne Herlitzius/Markus Marquardt/Stepanka Pucalkova/Sussan Deyhim/ Sinfoniechor Dresden/Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden/Roland Kluttig/dir. Immo Karaman.

Commissioned by Semperoper Dresden.

Full score available for hire, vocal score and parts in preparation.

VALGEIR SIGURÐSSON We Are in Time (2020) music-theatre work for actor, 2 singers, 12 strings and electronics. 90 minutes.

Text: Pamela Carter (Eng) Commissioned by Scottish Ensemble and Untitled Projects FP: 25.2.2020, Perth Theatre, Perth, Scotland, UK: Alison O’Donnell/Ruby Philogene/Jodie Landau/Scottish Ensemble/Untitled Projects/dir.Stewart Laing Full score and parts for hire

Orchestra FRANCISCO COLL Violin Concerto (2019) violin and orchestra. 25 mins.

2(II=picc).2.2(II=bcl).1.cbsn - 4221 - timp - perc(3): crot/glsp/t.bells/tuned c.bells/tuned gongs/xyl/mar/2 susp.cym/ ch.cym/clash.cym/sleigh bells/2 met.bl/2 c.bells/whip/sandpaper blocks/egg shaker/2 tamb/tom-tom/BD/drum set (splash. cym/2 tins/snare drum/cajon/3 tom-toms/kick drum) - harp - piano(=cel) - strings FP: 13.2.2020, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Luxembourg: Patricia Kopatchinskaja/Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg/ Gustavo Gimeno.

Commissioned by Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg; Philharmonie Luxembourg, London Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, the NTR ZaterdagMatinee, Radio 4 concert series in the Concertgebouw and Bamberger Symphoniker.

Score and parts in preparation Lilith (2019-20) orchestra. 11 mins.

2.picc.2.ca.2.bcl.2.cbsn - 4.2.ptpt.3.1 - timp - perc(3): crot / glsp / t.bells / siz.cym / 3 tpl.bl / 2 tom-t / kick drum / BD harp - strings (double basses: all require a low C extension; half require a low A extension) FP: 8.5.2020, Palau de la Música, Valencia, Spain: Orquesta de València/Francisco Coll.

Commissioned by the Orquesta de València.

Score and parts in preparation.

NIGEL HESS The Lakes of Cold Fen (2017) orchestra. 7 mins.

2222 - 3.3.2.btrbn.0 - timp - perc (1): susp.cym/glsp/tgl/mark tree/SD - harp - strings.

FP: 8.7.2017, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Concert Orchestra/Suzanne Dexter-Mills Commissioned by the Cambridge Concert Orchestra to mark its 50th anniversary Score and parts for hire.

The Old Man of Lochnagar Suite (2007) orchestra. 14 mins.

3(III=picc+afl+opt pipe).2(II=ca).2.asax(+ssax).2 - 4.3(I=flhn).2.btrbn.1 - timp - perc(3): glsp/vib/tamb/mark tree/tgl/SD/ drum kit/wdbl/susp.cym/finger cyms/bodhran/tam-t/2 tom-t – harp - guitar - keyboard (=pno) - strings Originally commissioned as a one-act ballet by The National Youth Ballet of Great Britain Score and parts for hire.

ANDERS HILLBORG Through Lost Landscapes (2019) large orchestra. 13 mins.

3(=picc).3.3.ssax.2.cbsn - 4.3.2.btrbn.1 - timp - perc(3): crot / glsp / t.bells / tgl / 4 tom-t / 3 congas / guiro / 2 vibraslap / BD – pno – cel – strings (16.14.12.10.8).

FP: 7.2.2020, Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes, Valladolid, Spain: Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León/Andrew Gourlay Commissioned by Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y Leon, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Score and parts in preparation.

22

DAVID MATTHEWS An Angel Passes: Prelude to Act II (2020) orchestra. c.4 mins 2.1.ca.2.2 - 2.2.0.0 - timp - strings.

Score and parts in preparation.

MARTIN SUCKLING This Departing Landscape (2019) orchestra. 20 mins.

3(all=picc).2.ca.2.bcl.2.cbsn - 4331 - perc(3): vib/2 crot/susp.cym/3 tgl/3 wdbl/medium wdbl/bongos/mcas/2 shakers/ guiro/2 whips/3 BD/drum kit - harp - strings.

Commissioned by BBC Radio 3.

Score and parts for hire.

JOHN WOOLRICH Hark! the echoing air (2019) solo trumpet and chamber orchestra. c. 9 mins. solo tpt. - picc.1.Ebcl.bcl.1 - 1.0.1.0 - strings (double basses require low C extension).

FP: 14.5.2020, Milton Court, London, UK: Alison Balsom/Britten Sinfonia.

Commissioned by Britten Sinfonia for Alison Balsom Score and parts for hire.

Ensemble TANSY DAVIES The rule is love (2019) a song cycle for contralto and chamber ensemble. 10 mins.

Texts: from ‘To the Wedding’ by John Berger and ‘The Pope must have been drunk, the King of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking modernity’ by Sylvia Wynter (English) ssax.bcl - perc(1-2*): vib/snare drum/tom-tom/drum kit(hi-hat/susp.cym/snare drum/tom-tom/BD) - vln.db *1 player needed if singer also plays drum kit (see performance notes).

Commissioned by London Sinfonietta and Kings Place. Supported by Jeremy and Yvonne Clarke, John Hodgson, Nicholas Hodgson, Ruth Rattenbury and a generous group of individual donors.

FP: 9.11.2019, Venus Unwrapped, Kings Place, London, UK: Elaine Mitchener/London Sinfonietta/Richard Baker Score and parts for hire

Chamber FRANCISCO COLL Brass Quintet (2018-19) brass quintet. c.20 mins 2 tpt in C(=tpt in Bb+ptpt in A).hn.tbn.tuba FP: 14.11.2019, Fringe of Gold Festival, Saints’ Church, St Andrews, Scotland, UK: Stockholm Chamber Brass.

Commissioned by the Wallace Collection and Stockholm Chamber Brass Score and parts in preparation.

VALGEIR SIGURÐSSON Cognitive Models (2019) string quartet and electronics. 40 minutes.

FP: 16.10.2019, BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium: In Praise of Folly/Valgeir Sigurdsson In preparation

NEW PUBLICATIONS AND RECORDINGS Vocal

Recent Publications

New Recordings

TANSY DAVIES

THOMAS ADÈS

THOMAS ADÈS

Lullaby from Cave (2019) mezzo-soprano, tenor and piano. 5 mins Text: Nick Drake (English).

FP: 12.01.2020, Spiritland, Royal Festival Hall: Mark Padmore/Elaine Mitchener/ Rolf Hind Commissioned by London Sinfonietta.

Score in preparation.

Choral HOWARD GOODALL All the good you can (2019) SATB choir and organ (with optional unison congregation, handbells, and additional piano). 3 mins.

Text: Charles Wesley (English) FP: September 2019, Davidson United Methodist Church (Davidson, NC, USA): Davidson United Methodist Church Chancel Choir Commissioned for Reverend Kevin A. Turner by the Music Ministry of Davidson United Methodist Church, North Carolina, in honor and gratitude for his 20 years of service In preparation Christmas Cantata (2019) soprano solo, unison youth choir, SATB choir, organ and chamber orchestra. 32 mins.

Texts: Fray Iñigo de Mendoza; Anon; Edmund H Sears; Howard Goodall; Giles Fletcher; José de Valdivielso (English/Spanish /Latin) 1111 - 2200 - perc(2): sleigh bells/susp.cym/glsp/mcas/finger cym/SD/tgl/BD/ mark or bell tree/timp - harp - pno(=cel) - org - strings 64442 (min) FP: 15.12.2019 (3 performances), St Luke’s United Methodist Church, Houston, TX, USA: St Luke’s UMC Chancel Choir & Orchestra/Howard Goodall Christmas Cantata was compiled by the composer for the choirs of St Luke’s United Methodist Church, Houston, Texas, Sid Davis, Director of Music and Fine Arts Vocal score on sale (in preparation), full score, vocal score and parts for hire The Good-Morrow (2000) SSAA chorus and piano. 5 mins.

Text: John Donne (English) For Pamela Cook and Cantamus Girls’ Choir Vocal score available for dowload or on Special Sale from the Hire Library The Gravity of Kindness (2019) a Christmas Meditation for soprano solo, SATB choir and small orchestra. 15 mins.

Texts: ‘Kindness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye; Coventry Carol, Trad. 16th c. English; Arrorró mi niño, Trad. Mexican lullaby (Spanish/English) FP: 7.12.2019, St Peter’s Church, Acton Green, London, UK: Sarah Gabriel/The Addison Singers/Brandenburg Sinfonia/David Wordsworth Commissioned by the Addison Singers in memory of Cathy Bereznicki and thanks to her generous bequest Full score and parts for hire, vocal score for hire, or on sale from the Hire Library

Four Purcell Songs

Score 0-571-54155-0

£14.99

The Tempest

Full score (paperback edition) 0-571-53838-X

£120.00

GEORGE BENJAMIN Lessons in Love and Violence

Full Score 0-571-53884-3

£100.00

Chanson et Bagatelle

£16.99

JOHN HARLE RANT!

Score and part 0-571-54134-8

£10.99

JONATHAN HARVEY Speakings

Score 0-571-53888-6

£39.99

HOWARD GOODALL All the good you can

SATB/organ 0-571-54091-0

£2.50

Spring of the Water of Life

SATB 0-571-54092-9

£3.50

OLIVER KNUSSEN O Hototogisu!

Score 0-571-54127-5

TANSY DAVIES Antenoux Crash Ensemble Crash Records

JONNY GREENWOOD

FRANCISCO COLL

Score and part 0-571-54078-3

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra/Totentanz Kirill Gerstein/Mark Stone/Christianne Stotijn/Boston Symphony Orchestra/ Thomas Adès Deutsche Grammophon

£24.99

Three Miniatures from ‘Water’ Daniel Pioro/Katherine Tinker/Clare O’Connell/Christopher Graves/Dave Brown/ Nicolas Magriel/Jonny Greenwood Octatonic Records OCTAT02

JONATHAN HARVEY Song Offerings Sarah Dacey/Riot Ensemble/Aaron Holloway-Nahum Coviello Classics

KEATON HENSON Six Lethargies Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Mark Knoop Mercury KX 4818679

COLIN MATTHEWS/ANNA MEREDITH Postludes/Tripotage Miniatures Britten Sinfonia/Nicholas Daniel NMC

PETER SCULTHORPE From Irkanda III Seraphim Trio ABC Classics

VALGEIR SIGURÐSSON An Acceptable Loss (original soundtrack recording) Bedroom Community HVALUR28 The County (original soundtrack recording) Bedroom Community Hvalreki

The Spring of the Water of Life (2019) SATB choir, trumpet and organ. 5 mins.

Texts: Gerard Manley Hopkins; George Herbert; Book of Revelation (English) FP: 15.9.2019, Wilshire Baptist Church (Dallas, TX, USA): Wilshire Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir, Doug Haney Commissioned by Wilshire Baptist Church to mark the 30th anniversary of Senior Pastor George A. Mason In preparation

MATTHEW HINDSON da-bi-du (2019) unaccompanied SSATBarB voices. 3 mins.

Text: International Phonetic Alphabet FP: 122.10.2019, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW, Australia: The Song Company/Antony Pitts Commissioned by The Song Company Score on special sale from the Hire Library

23

Remembering Raymond Leppard (1927–2019) Raymond Leppard, the renowned conductor, harpsichordist, composer and scholar, died in October at the age of 92.

Martin Kingsbury - former Managing Director of Faber Music and a founding director of the company - looks back at Leppard’s relationship with Faber Music and reflects on his broader legacy: Faber Music’s long and fruitful association with Raymond Leppard goes right back to the company’s foundation. Its very first catalogue in January 1965 announced the forthcoming publication of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea in Leppard’s performing edition, recently launched at Glyndebourne.

It seems hard to believe now, but at that time this masterpiece was hardly known to the opera-going public. At Glyndebourne audiences marvelled at Leppard’s opulent realisation and critics were enthusiastic. ‘My admiration for Leppard’s edition grows at each hearing,’ wrote one seasoned critic. ‘His continuo-based realisation can alone allow the freedom of declamation which the work needs.’

Because Leppard was not only a musicologist but also a superb musician and dramatist, his edition of Poppea was conspicuously successful in making the work speak to contemporary audiences.

Within a few years it had been taken up in opera houses all over the world, from New York to Paris and Berlin, from Copenhagen to Sydney and San Francisco – no mean achievement. The revenue it brought in was, moreover, crucial to Faber Music in its early years, and encouraged us to pursue further publishing projects with him.

They were not slow in coming. While investigating Monteverdi in the Marciana library in Venice, Leppard had unearthed operas by Francesco Cavalli, Monteverdi’s successor in Venetian musical life, none of whose works had been performed since the 17th century. He proved to be a natural melodist with real theatrical flair. Hot on the success of Poppea, Glyndebourne asked Leppard to edit and conduct stagings of L’Ormindo (1967) and La Calisto (1970), and Santa Fé Opera commissioned and premiered editions of L’Egisto (1974) and L’Orione (1983). All were published by Faber and soon found their way into the operatic repertoire. La Calisto and L’Ormindo have been particularly successful. In addition, sacred choral works by Cavalli, also unearthed by Leppard, have been welcomed into the choral repertoire. To rehabilitate this master composer of the early Italian baroque was another of Leppard’s notable achievements.

Leppard’s fully-scored opera realisations were conceived for mainstream performers in opera houses, not for baroque music specialists, who were a relatively rare species in the 1960s. In time, however, their number increased, and with the advent of more technically accomplished period instrument groups and ‘historically informed’ performance, Leppard’s type of realisation began to fall out of favour. That said, opera houses, lacking their own specialist players, still found them practical and their audiences still loved them. The Leppard edition of Poppea, for example, continued in Glyndebourne’s repertoire right into the 1980s, even though by then music critics had started sniping at it.

24

L’Orione proved to be a watershed. Praised by critics in Santa Fé at its 1983 premiere, it was reviled by critics in Edinburgh the following year (though much enjoyed by audiences in both cities). It was clear to us at Faber that much of the adverse criticism in Edinburgh was poorly informed and unduly influenced by received opinion. So in true eighteenth-century pamphleteering style, we decided to issue a combative pamphlet to inform and criticise the critics. ‘In Defence of L’Orione’ contained factual material about the opera, its manuscript and Leppard’s intentions in making the realisation plus a vibrant defence of it by the Professor of Music at Edinburgh University.

Understandably it provoked anger from a few critics but also brought some reasoned consideration in the media of the issues involved and support for Leppard’s pioneering work from members of the academic world.

The purpose here is not to refight old battles but to reiterate Leppard’s passionately held view that an ‘authentic’ performance is one that makes a work come alive for the audience today. In his words ‘It does not lie with the current fads and fashions of musicology... No half-hearted attempt hampered by academic restraint will do.’ As the movement for ‘historically informed’ performance grew, Leppard did not change his view but eventually softened it somewhat. As he told The Times in 1997: ‘Pupils of mine were playing in the newly “authentic” way. I felt it was their turn – they should now get on with it.’ Anyone who gets involved with performing an early baroque work in an opera house today will (or perhaps should) recognise their debt to Leppard for having opened up this opportunity for them.

We salute Raymond Leppard for his multiple achievements and for his defining role in Faber Music’s history.

Valgeir Sigurðsson’s ‘We Are in Time’ Premieres in Glasgow

We Are in Time is an arresting new music-theatre work by Valgeir Sigurðsson to a text by Pamela Carter.

Premiered to great acclaim in February and March, with a sevendate Scottish tour, We Are in Time featured superlative performances

by Scottish Ensemble and Untitled Projects (director Stewart Laing). Scored for narrator, 2 singers, 12-piece string ensemble and electronics, the 90-minute work is a fascinating and moving meditation on the journey of a transplanted heart. Jay, sung by Jodie Landau, is rendered brain-dead by an accident, and his heart is given up for donation to Stella, a sufferer from heart disease, powerfully sung by Ruby Philogene. Throughout this boldly innovative piece, Alison O’Donnell’s narrator guides us through the medical procedure with gentle efficiency.

‘Moving and strange… A shimmering miasma of sound’ ‘All art is an exploration of what makes us human, but it’s a brave piece that tackles that most fundamental question head on… Carter’s text creates an effective dramatic scenario in which to ask these enormous questions. We Are in Time is partly about the heart’s physical journey from one body to another, but on a deeper level it delves into visceral questions of the characters’ existence… Sigurðsson’s score is a shimmering miasma of sound, occasionally punctuated by soaring lyricism from the voices or from the string players, whose masterful playing is fundamental to the piece’s success. They gamely sing the part of the Chorus, too, their syllabic unison evoking Gregorian chant… the simple set, consisting of two operating tables, allows the story to unfold clearly, and the blue-green visuals subtly evoke the sterility of the hospital ward and the fear of being alone. This is an impressive premiere, moving and strange, and it never loses sight of the fact that, as the chorus ultimately reminds us, we’re all only human.’

‘The cumulative effect is quite something – a work that weaves together contemporary classical music, philosophical ponderings and hard facts in a moving paean to a modern medical miracle.’

The Stage (Fergus Morgan), 27 February 2020

‘Witty and fascinating, full of ear-catching lines’ ‘Surely the most adventurous of the many bold collaborations that have been undertaken by the Scottish Ensemble under Morton’s leadership… It is witty and fascinating, full of ear-catching lines and with a score that references early music as well as traditional. As the story darkens, the music seems to become lighter, Landau’s voice using some of the same palette as the Beach Boys and Philogene’s later aria of survival rates in transplant surgery having a distinct resemblance to the sound of Glasgow’s Blue Nile…The parallel between the chamber group and a surgical team is the final metaphor in production that wears its substantial technical achievements lightly, and is, critically, full of heart.’

Herald Scotland (Keith Bruce), 27 February 2020

The Times (Simon Thompson), 27 February 2020

PHOTOS: ‘WE ARE IN TIME’ © TOMMY GA-KEN WAN

25

Proms premiere for Jonny Greenwood

Anna Meredith’s FIBS There has been unbridled praise across the board for Anna Meredith’s second album, FIBS, now available on the Moshi Moshi label.

Following on from her first release, Varmints, this infectiously inventive disc once again features her versatile 5-piece band. Guitar, cello, tuba, drums are complemented by the composer herself on vocals, clarinet, keyboard and tub-thumping percussion.

Having just completed tours in the UK, USA and Canada, the band have a summer filled with festival appearances at the likes of Latitude, Roskilde, End of the Road, Rewire, Tremor and Bluedot.

‘A thrilling testament to Meredith’s seemingly limitless capacity for reinvention.’

Q Magazine (Rupert Howe), January 2020

‘The effect of all this incongruity is like a hundred bolts from the blue: FIBS is brimming with contrary combinations, irreverent genre-bending and serious innovation.’

The Guardian (Rachel Aroesti), 25 Oct 2019

Jonny Greenwood’s violin concerto Horror vacui was premiered to widespread acclaim last summer as part of a late-night BBC Prom. A BBC commission, the work was written for soloist Daniel Pioro who was joined on stage by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Proms Youth Ensemble, and conductor Hugh Brunt.

Performed to a near sell-out Royal Albert Hall, and broadcast on both BBC 4 and Radio 3, Greenwood’s major new work sees him take inspiration electronic reverb and echo effects, manipulating the violin and massed strings to telling effect. The 36-minute concerto is scored for solo violin and 68 solo string players (18.18.12.12.8) and brought to an end an programme that had been specially curated

by Greenwood himself (who performed on both tanpura and bass guitar). Also featured were one of the Three Miniatures from ‘Water’, his piano piece 88 No.1, and works by Biber, Penderecki and Reich.

‘easily the most engaging premiere of the season’ ‘A cleverly conceived and superbly executed Prom… As for Greenwood’s own pieces, they proved that as a composer he continues to grow. The gentle, mystically perfumed violinand-piano patterns of Water, unfolding over twanging drones on the Indian tanpura, and the dazzling piano virtuosity of 88 (No 1) were certainly engaging. But his new piece was on a different level of ambition. This was a delightfully naïve yet sophisticated exercise in re-imagining sound-effects obtainable in a studio, such as booming reverberations, or repeated “dying-away” echoes, or uncanny slidings of whole sound-complexes up and down. Every sad drooping phrase or vehement outburst or glassy high note from the violin was seized on and magically transformed by the string players, who were sometimes called on to blow into or slap their instruments… easily the most engaging premiere of the season so far.’

The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 11 September 2019

‘A startling, terrifying and challenging way to end a compelling Prom.’

‘Twisting and sweeping, full of sharp left turns and thrilling rollercoaster dips, this is Meredith at her most maximalist…

A freewheeling, freethinking treat for the senses which reveals a musician at the height of her powers.’

The Line of Best Fit (Chris Taylor), 25 October 2019

RSNO give UK premiere of Elfman Concerto Danny Elfman’s Violin Concerto ‘Eleven Eleven’ has received its long-awaited UK premiere, with performances in Edinburgh and Glasgow on 29 and 30 November 2019 by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, with soloist and dedicatee Sandy Cameron, conducted by John Mauceri. They formed part of a full-evening Elfman Gala programme that also included extended suites from his much-loved film scores: ‘The slow movement has a lovely operatic beginning and there is something glorious about the wryly reverential scampering opening to the finale.’

The Herald (Keith Bruce), 2 December 2019

‘Elfman has an almost miraculous way of conjuring up the grotesque and the poignant.’

The Scotsman (David Kettle), 2 December 2019

Cameron’s appearances followed in the wake of her acclaimed performances given in October with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta: ‘Like any great composer, Elfman’s signature style is unmistakably his own… all his trademark effects were on display. With commissions from Carnegie Hall, Cirque du Soleil and the Berlin Philharmonic, Elfman’s days as merely a film composer may be limited.’

The Buffalo News (Leonidas Lagrimas), 18 October 2019

Cameron gives the London premiere of the Violin Concerto with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Bramwell Tovey on 21 April 2020 in the Royal Festival Hall.

Elfman is now hard at work on a major new commission from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, who will give the premiere with Elim Chan on their UK tour this summer.

The Guardian (John Lewis), 11 September 2019

26

PHOTOS: JONNY GREENWOOD, DANIEL PIORO AND HUGH BRUNT AFTER THEIR LATE-NIGHT PROM © MARK ALLAN

Derek Bermel at the top of his game There has been fulsome praise for Derek Bermel’s recent Naxos release, ‘Migrations’, a recent Grammy nomination for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. The disc features premiere recordings of three dazzlingly inventive orchestral works.

The Migration Series for jazz band and chamber orchestra was inspired

by Jacob Lawrence’s celebrated series of paintings by depicting the Great Migration. Mar de Setembro for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra sets five poems by Eugénio de Andrade, evoking the longing of Portuguese and Brazilian saudade. Finally, A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace for chamber orchestra pays tribute to Béla Bartók’s last years as an immigrant in New York City.

With superlative performances from David Alan Miller, the Albany Symphony, Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, saxophonist Ted Nash, mezzosoprano Luciana Souza, and Bermel himself on clarinet ‘Migrations’ is a perfect showcase for Bermel’s prodigious compositional talents.

‘What a melting pot of musical styles! Bermel’s endless invention initially ruffles your feathers but leaves you breathless in the end. Captivating and colourful.’

BBC Music Magazine (Michael Beek), October 2019

‘A grand celebration of one of America’s great living composers at the top of his game.’

National Youth Choir release Jessica Curry’s She Who Now out on the NMC label is the premiere recording of Jessica Curry’s 2019 choral work, She Who. Commissioned and premiered as part of the PRS Foundation’s New Music Biennial 2019, the 15-minute composition was premiered by the National Youth Chamber Choir of Great Britain in Nottingham, London, Hull and Bath last summer.

It takes two texts written by American feminist poet Judy Grahn and fuses them into a compelling and innovative choral work. The piece is written at a time where women are questioning the world they have been told to accept, reconsidering history and community, and celebrating the power of the female. Simultaneously, young people’s voices are emerging as the most powerful, positive force for change in global politics. She Who begins as a fraught conversation between men and women, and blossoms into a celebration of the diverse, beautiful, collective voice.

‘Curry addressed female power in She Who, a radiant, catchy work for the National Youth Chamber Choir.’

The Guardian (Fiona Maddocks), 13 July 2019

Goodall to conduct Invictus at Carnegie Hall

The Arts Fuse (Jonathan Blumhofer), 12 September 2019

Keaton Henson’s debut orchestral album There’s been fulsome critical praise for Keaton Henson’s new album ‘Six Lethargies’ – his first orchestral release. The Mercury KX recording follows the concert premiere by Britten Sinfonia in London’s Barbican in 2018 and subsequent performances in Dublin and Sydney.

A six-movement, 65-minute work for string orchestra, Six Lethargies explores themes and issues surrounding anxiety and depression.

Henson’s own struggles with depression are well-documented and, in addressing the issue head-on in this, his largest composition to date, he has told his story through the music allowing the orchestra to be his voice, as well as providing human connection and insight into the condition.

‘Extending a time-honoured lineage from Dowland’s Lachrymae to Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia… Henson charts a surprisingly wide tonal and expressive terrain, sketched before him by Nick Drake and Arvo Pärt as well as his own ‘Romantic Works’ album of 2014, but now developed with an individual patience and confidence that allow him to string out the implications of a dissonant chord or a passacaglia sequence over extended spans.’

Gramophone (Peter Quantrill), January 2020

‘One of the most moving pieces of music of the last decade.

Henson has shown to be an exceptional musician, artist, poet, and, now, composer… a visceral listening experience that conjures an image of the turbulence he braves through lilting melodies and impassioned melodies. There is quite no other album like it, and one would only be doing themselves a disservice by not experiencing it.’

Atwood Magazine (Adrian Vargas), 16 January 2020

Howard Goodall will conduct the New York premiere of his most recent large-scale choral work, Invictus: A Passion, in Carnegie Hall on 7 June, as part of a double-bill with his much-loved Eternal Light: A Requiem (which has now received over 600 live performances worldwide). The event is being staged by Distinguished Concerts International New York (DCINY), who previously programmed Eternal Light in 2016. The choir will comprise singers from across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Ireland, UK and Sweden – many of whom have previously sung the works with their own choirs and who will now join forces to celebrate Goodall’s unique choral sound.

New Goodall choral publications We are delighted to announce the publication of two new Goodall choral works: All the good you can is a 3-minute anthem for SATB and organ (with optional extras). It was commissioned from Davidson United Methodist Church in North Carolina, who premiered it there in September last year. The Spring of the Water of Life is a 7-minute anthem for SATB choir, trumpet and organ that sets texts by Gerald Manley Hopkins and George Herbert. It was commissioned by Wilshire Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir in Dallas and was also premiered in September 2019.

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Four Purcell Songs realised by Thomas Adès Adès made these four Purcell realisations for medium voice and piano for recitals with the countertenor Iestyn Davies in 2012 and 2017. Adès (who composed his own highly successful opera after The Tempest in 2003) here turns his attention two of Purcell’s Tempest songs ‘Come Unto these Yellow Sands’ and ‘Full Fathom Five’, alongside the much-loved ‘An Evening Hymn’ and ‘By Beauteous Softness’. The whole collection lasts around 12 minutes.

In an interview with Tom Service, Adès described Purcell’s manner of setting English text as ‘magnificent’ remarking that ‘the way that emotion, the rhythm of the words, is rendered into music is incomparably natural and powerful.’ All of these qualities are brought to the fore in these realisations, which should prove an invaluable addition to the repertoire.

‘Beautifully realized for piano.’

Classical Source (David M. Rice), 15 October 2017 Score | 0-571-54155-0 | £14.99

USA & CANADA

Jonathan Harvey: Songs and Haiku

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Songs and Haiku is a collection of songs for mezzo-soprano and piano, published in 2019 to mark what would have been Jonathan Harvey’s 80th birthday.

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

Two haiku (the first for piano alone – the only piece here to have been published before – the latter by Bashō) bookend three love songs dedicated to Harvey’s wife Rosa. The grouping of the pieces into a 8-minute cycle was the composer’s own idea, and it mixes Eastern and Western poets in a totally characteristic manner. Both Tagore and E. E. Cummings are represented, poets who feature in some of Harvey’s finest works (Song Offerings and Forms of Emptiness, respectively), and a third song sets Tennyson’s ‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal’.

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Score | 0-571-54115-1 | £14.99

Colin Matthews: Un Colloque Sentimental Colin Matthews’ 20 minute song cycle for medium voice and piano, Un Colloque Sentimental, unashamedly references French music tradition in its elegant settings of poems by Baudelaire, Nerval and Verlaine.

The two ‘Colloque Sentimental’ pieces which frame the cycle expertly form the arc for a tale of faded romance illustrated with a continually climbing vocal line endlessly stumbling over bell-like chords and low, grumbling octaves; reminiscent of Debussy and Messiaen. The ‘Le Jet d’Eau’ and ‘Que Diras-tu ce soir’ songs reference the bubbling piano textures of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and ‘Une Allée du Luxembourg’ has an inevitable quality to it. Amongst the chirping birds of the Luxembourg gardens, the rhythmic footsteps plant a fate which leads into the broken nostalgia of ‘Colloque’. Matthews’ settings feel like vignettes, frozen images with a harmonic and melodic stillness; like memories basking in their own beauty.

Score | 0-571-50575-9 | £6.99

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