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The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery, National Poetry Library and Arts Council Collection. We’re one of London’s favourite meeting spots, with lots of free events and places to relax, eat and shop.
We’re the largest arts centre in the UK and one of the nation’s top visitor attractions, showcasing the world’s most exciting artists at our venues in the heart of London. We’re here to present great cultural experiences that bring people together, and open up the arts to everyone.
Welcome to the Southbank Centre
Building on this success, the London Sinfonietta Academy’s future is to reach out further into the education establishments of the UK to find ever more young musicians who aspire to engage with the music of today. Our Academy Pathways programme next season will reach a more diverse group of musicians and find ways to support them all in the skills and insights that will help them engage with music written by living composers. We are hugely grateful to the trusts, foundations and individual donors who fund this project. It
Every year our players and staff are amazed at the technical abilities of the young musicians –many congratulations to you all for your achievement, I hope the opportunity has inspired you for the future. Having run this project for many years, we can see its impact: several young musicians who have taken part have gone on to form their own new music ensembles, and several have returned to us in fully professional work. We trust that each musician has enjoyed it, and that the course has helped establish their network for the future.
Welcome to Musicians of Tomorrow – the culmination of our 14th annual London Sinfonietta Academy. It feels like a true celebration of the year, and is one of the most important things the London Sinfonietta has always stood for.
WELCOME
*London Sinfonietta Principal Player
Declan Hickey† guitar
Christopher Bradley cimbalom
Toril Azzalini-Machecler† percussion
David Hockings* percussion
Cara Dawson† harp
Julian Chan† piano
Clíodna Shanahan keyboard
Ruohua Li† double bass
Enno Senft* double bass
Joseph Dawson† cello
Tim Gill* cello
Laura Cooper† viola
Paul Silverthorne* viola
Emily Trubshaw† violin
Sydney Grace Mariano† violin
David Alberman violin
2023/24 SEASON AT THE SOUTHBANK CENTRE
LIGETI 100
Celebrating the life of the provocatively distinctive composer György Ligeti, beloved of Stanley Kubrick, in his centenary year
Sat 14 Oct, Queen Elizabeth Hall
MARIUS NESET: GEYSER
We reunite with “marvel” Norwegian saxophone virtuoso and composer Marius Neset to perform our “elemental” third collaboration
Fri 17 Nov, Queen Elizabeth Hall
21ST CENTURY VOICES
An unflinching critique of modern society, contrasting excerpts from Hans Werner Henze’s iconic Voices with contemporary responses
Sat 25 Nov, Queen Elizabeth Hall
A BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
We mark the anniversary of our first-ever concert with a mix of new commissions and classic chamber repertoire
Wed 24 Jan, Purcell Room
SUPPORT US
LONDON SINFONIETTA CHANNEL
Explore the music, composers and performers behind the ensemble with concert films, podcasts, guides and more at londonsinfonietta.org.uk/channel
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By making a donation to the London Sinfonietta, you can help create world-class new music projects both onstage and online. You can help us reach thousands of young people each year through our composition programmes in schools, and enable us to provide worldclass training to the next generation of talent. londonsinfonietta.org.uk/support-us
Connor Gingell† tuba
Pau Hernández Santamaria† trombone/bass trombone/euphonium
Ryan Hume trombone
Ruby Orlowska† trumpet/flugel horn
William Morley trumpet
Alice Knight† french horn
Timothy Ellis french horn
Sophia Elger† soprano saxophone/alto saxophone
Amy Thompson† bassoon/contra bassoon
Sarah Burnett bassoon
Rowan Jones† clarinet/bass clarinet/contrabass clarinet
Timothy Lines clarinet/bass clarinet
Alex Franklin† oboe/cor anglais
James Hulme oboe
Cara Houghton† flute/piccolo/alto flute
Helen Keen flute/piccolo
London Sinfonietta:
Geoffrey Paterson conductor
Diana Burrell Bronze
Steven Gerber Three Pieces for Two Violins
Samantha Fernando Sound Inhabitants (London Sinfonietta commission, World premiere)
Mark-Antony Turnage Dark Crossing Interval
Kai Kubota-Enright Night, the automaton dreams (World premiere)
Harrison Birtwistle The World Is Discovered
Pierre Boulez Initiale
Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall
Wednesday 19 July 2023, 7.45pm
Programme Notes
Pierre Boulez Initiale
Initiale, scored for a brass ensemble, begins with the energy and the gleam of a fanfare. But as its helixes of notes eddy and swirl, a sense of timelessness and depth engulfs us. Like many of Boulez’s most successful compositions, Initiale combines traditional instrumentation and modern sound. In listening to any Boulez composition, it is useful to focus on textures and contours.
In Initiale, the textures have a radiant aura and the contours seem to churn. The result is almost hypnotic. As the phrases spiral outward, the repetition of certain pitches gives them a sort of gravitational pull that orients us in musical space. Eventually a shimmering pattern of motivic statement takes shape. Is Boulez inviting us to hear Initiale as a fanfare? Its all-brass scoring and its title may provide a clue.
© Michael Clive
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) was a composer, conductor, and thinker, who consistently rebelled against tradition. He was a leading conductor, music director, and founder of several institutions: the Domaine musical, IRCAM, Ensemble intercontemporain, Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Lucerne Festival Academy in Switzerland.
Harrison Birtwistle The World is Discovered
Birtwistle’s source of inspiration here was twofold: firstly, an admiration for the music of Isaac, the 15th century Flemish master, whose instrumental canzonas he had been writing out for his pupils at Cranbourne Chase to play; and secondly, a visit to the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery. At the Tate, some prominence was given to a number of studies in which Picasso had taken various aspects (technical and material) of a picture by Velasquez and had expanded and exploited each in a painting of his own. Birtwistle
Though the title seems to hint at some programmatic element, Turnage denies that there is any pictorial basis to this music, which, he says, is much more freely composed than anything he has written before; ‘I began the movements to see what would happen, and where the music would go’. A hint of Debussy’s La Mer in the first movement suggests other associations too, and if pressed, Turnage concedes that the three movements might be construed as seascapes, but it is much better surely to take the music at face value, and to follow it to see where indeed it goes.
© Andrew Clements
A composer of international stature, Mark-Anthony Turnage is among the most significant figures to have emerged in British music of the last three decades, forging his own path between modernism and tradition by means of a unique blend of jazz and classical styles. His opera, The Silver Tassie, won both the South Bank Show and the Olivier Awards for Opera.
Samantha Fernando Sound Inhabitants
Sound Inhabitants is constructed out of contrasting blocks of sound. These are heard individually and in layers that overlap, collagelike. During the writing process, I deliberately eschewed motivic development and transition. Instead, my aim was to create sound states or spaces. Rooms of sound that can be inhabited.
©
Sam Fernando
Resonance and harmonic colour play a vital role in Samantha Fernando’s intensely colourful and often meditative music. Samantha (b.1984) has worked with numerous ensembles and collaborated with writers, directors, choreographers and performers. Her music has been performed at festivals here and abroad.
decided to take a group of Isaac canzonas and treat them in the same way. This does not mean that listeners will necessarily trace resemblances in the way that a Vittoria motet is recognisable in its kindred mass; they are there to help the composer rather than the audience.
The work is divided into alternate verse and chorus sections. The Verses, for instance, are all wind solos with guitar, successively flute, clarinet and oboe, whereas the Choruses use larger groups and are joined by the guitar only in the finale. There is a reference in the last chorus to Isaac’s canzona Der Weld Fundt, from which the work derives its title.
© Universal Edition
Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022) studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, founding a highly talented group of contemporaries. Birtwistle’s music is uncompromising in its complexity and abrasive harmonies. His music has been featured in major festivals and concert series throughout the world.
Kai Kubota-Enright Night, the automaton dreams
The piece explores the Japanese concept of karakuri, which describes an object that creates a sense of wonder by concealing its inner workings. It is more commonly used in the context of Karakuri puppets, the Japanese equivalent of automata which were developed after the introduction of European clock-making technology in the seventeenth century. Musically, the clockwork is represented primarily by the piano and percussion at first, while the string and woodwind players represent the concealed mechanism of the piece. This is inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ work in deep listening and sonic meditation.
The players will be called upon to choose desired pitches by listening carefully to their environment, and wordlessly communicating. This type of
Steven
R. Gerber Three Pieces for Two Violins
Three Pieces was begun in part as a study for a concerto for two violins, strings, and harp entitled Serenade Concertante, written for the Russian violinist Tatjana Grindenko and recorded on Arabesque. The first movement alternates material suggestive of the so-called “mystic minimalism” (I borrowed this music from my Sonatina for oboe and guitar) with a more rhythmic, rather Coplandesque idea; the second movement is much more dissonant and harsh; the diatonic finale is lyrical and contemplative.
© Steven R. Gerber
Steven R. Gerber’s (19482015) early works were in a free atonal style, but in the 1980s, his music became more tonal, yet still retaining the expressive elements of his earlier works. His catalogue includes chamber and large-scale works, song cycles, choral works and solo pieces.
Diana Burrell Bronze
Bronze has got a big cimbalom part and a prepared piano, bamboo chimes, and a lot of woodwind multiphonics – where woodwind players can get harmonics with certain fingerings to create strange chord sounds; there is this passage where there’s cimbalom, prepared piano and multiphonics all at once – I thought ‘this is a great sound!’ But again it’s not very conventional really. Also I probably won’t want to do that anymore, I’ll have to find something else now.
©
Diana Burrell
Diana Burrell was born in Norwich in 1948. She spent several years as a teacher, and freelance viola player, but gradually concentrated on writing music. Her early pieces were a launching pad for an ongoing series of evermore illustrious commissions and an impressively wide-ranging, adventurous and distinguished body of work.
musical collaboration and thinking is invisible to the audience, and is the nature of the hidden inner workings of the piece. The “telepathy” is a sort of audiation group exercise which gives great agency to the performers whilst at the same time directing them to very specific states of mind and ritualistic order.
In this work determinate and indeterminate styles of composition blend to create sound experiences which connect and interact with the sonic ecosystem of the space, rather than existing as a “separate” art piece that ignores the ambient sound of the space it is being performed in. This ultimately creates a music that is both a piece as well as the creation of a sonic ecosystem—an open space for sound creation as opposed to a strictly written out composition that invites careful observation and intrigue from any observers. I feel that exploring this sort of audience engagement and approach to sound as a sonic ecosystem is relevant in a time when we are continually reevaluating our relationships to each other as individuals, as well as our relationship to the environments and spaces we create and inhabit.
Kai Kubota-Enright is a composer based in Montréal, studying at McGill University. They have composed for feature-length student films, short films and documentaries. Their music often incorporates improvisational, electronic, and site-specific elements, and larger collaborations involving dance, installations, and projection art.
Mark-Antony Turnage Dark Crossing
The London Sinfonietta played a crucial role in launching Mark-Anthony Turnage’s career as a composer in the early 1980s. When Turnage was asked to write something new for the London Sinfonietta, his first instinct was to complete the song cycle based on World War I poetry that he had been contemplating for the baritone Gerald Finley, who had created the central role of Harry in The Silver Tassie. But Oliver Knussen was keen for him to come up with a purely orchestral work, so the song cycle (now called Torn Fields) has gone elsewhere, and Turnage has completed the three movements (études, Turnage calls them) of Dark Crossing instead. But the ghost of vocal
Geoffrey Paterson conductor
British conductor Geoffrey Paterson is admired for his impressive grasp of detail, responsiveness to musicians, and his ability to shape and make music from the most complex scores with natural authority. He is praised for his ‘winning combination of assuredness, agility and enthusiasm’ (The Telegraph) and ‘instinct for pace’ (The Spectator) in repertoire ranging from Bach to Birtwistle and beyond.
LONDON SINFONIETTA
The London Sinfonietta is one of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles. Formed in 1968, we are a Resident Orchestra at the Southbank Centre and Artistic Associate at Kings Place, with a busy touring schedule. We have commissioned over 450 works and premiered hundreds more.
We experiment constantly, working with the best artists, collaborating with young people and the public to produce projects often involving film, theatre, dance and art. We challenge audience perceptions by commissioning work which addresses issues in today’s society, including tackling climate change and racial inequality. We support musical creativity in schools and communities across the UK, while our annual London Sinfonietta Academy is an unparalleled opportunity for young performers and conductors to train for their professional future with our Principal Players.
We continue to innovate with our digital Channel, featuring video programmes and podcasts about new music. Steve Reich described our stunning film of his Violin Phase as “the most satisfactory version [he’d] ever seen”, while our documentary film about Laura Bowler’s Houses Slide generated national press coverage. We created Steve Reich’s Clapping Music App for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, a participatory rhythm game that has been downloaded over 600,000 times worldwide. The back catalogue of recordings of the Ensemble over 50 years has helped to cement its world-wide reputation. More recent recordings include George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill (Nimbus), Benet Casablancas’ The Art of Ensemble (Sony Classical), David Lang’s Writing on Water (Cantaloupe Music) Philip Venables’ debut album Below the Belt (NMC) and Marius Neset’s Viaduct (ACT).
londonsinfonietta.org.uk
