New Traditions Programme

NEW TRADITIONS

Thursday 22 February 2024, 7.45pm

Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall

Sky Macklay Microvariations (UK premiere)

George Lewis Tales of the Traveller

Interval

Katherine Balch Waste Knot (UK premiere)

Michel van der Aa Shades of Red (UK premiere)

Nina Guo soprano

Jack Sheen conductor

London Sinfonietta:

Helen Keen flute

Melinda Maxwell oboe

Timothy Lines clarinet

Mark van de Wiel* clarinet

Jonathan Morton* violin

Hilaryjane Parker violin

Paul Silverthorne* viola

Sally Pendlebury cello

Enno Senft* double bass

Siwan Rhys keyboard

David Hockings* percussion

Heledd Gwynant percussion

Pete Wilson bass guitar

Tom Ellis guitar

WELCOME

Welcome to tonight’s concert

Having just returned from the Baerum Jazz Festival in Norway with this project, it’s great now to be performing this exciting work once again, now in the EFG London Jazz Festival. Marius’ amazing musical imagination provides a thrilling challenge for our musicians who relish the virtuosity of the music.

While we are grateful to Marius that he chooses to return and write for us and work with us, we are also honoured to play alongside his colleagues – Ivo, Jim, Conor and Anton – whose extraordinary improvising and ensemble skills have resulted in a mutual admiration society between the musicians on stage. I don’t think you can help but see how much they are enjoying this project.

I also want to thank Geoffrey Paterson for keeping this rollercoaster ride on track, and for the BBC Proms for originally commissioning Geyser. And also to Southbank Centre where we are proudly a Resident Orchestra.

I hope you enjoy the evening.

Andrew Burke

Chief Executive and Artistic Director

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Welcome to the Southbank Centre

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Thursday 22 February 2024, 7.45pm

2023/24

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Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall

The London Sinfonietta is grateful to Arts Council England for its support of the ensemble, as well as the many other individuals, trusts and businesses who enable us to realise our ambitions. The work of the London Sinfonietta is supported by the John Ellerman Foundation, and this concert is produced by London Sinfonietta.

Programme Notes

Sky Macklay Microvariations

Microvariations was composed in 2016 for Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. I revised the piece in 2017 and this is the revised version performed by the ensemble of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec and conducted by Walter Boudreau.

In 1825, British conductor George Thomas Smart traveled across Europe and compared his A=423.5hz tuning fork to the tuning of every musical group he could find. Some ensembles were perfectly in tune with his tuning fork, but others, especially around Vienna, were quite a bit higher and closer to today’s standard A=440hz. Microvariations is a fast-forward and transcontinental sonic truncation and fantasy on Smart’s journey. Pieces that he probably heard, entire symphonies and sonatas of the common practice period, are distilled to their most skeletal, structural chord progressions and played at hyper speeds. Microvariations begins with material similar to that in my string quartet Many Many Cadences: predictable tonal chord progressions recontextualized into fast cells that are constantly changing key. Microvariations situates the cadences in two different groups (“towns”) playing a quarter tone apart from one another, at first distinct and eventually congealing and blurring.

— Sky Macklay

The music of Baltimorebased composer, oboist, and installation artist Sky Macklay is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, surreal tonality, and the physicality of sound. Some of her pieces incorporate non-musical media, addressing topics ranging from commuting times to side effects of contraceptive and assisted reproductive technology. Sky has been commissioned by funds and ensembles across the USA and internationally.

Soprano Nina Guo is interested in the sounds of recent and ongoing times, and her performance practice includes interpreting notated music, improvising, and collaborating on interdisciplinary projects.

After receiving a Bachelor’s degree in classical voice from the New England Conservatory of Music (2015), she completed a Master’s degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (2020). As a contemporary music specialist, her upcoming performances include solo appearances with Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt) and Decoder Ensemble (Hamburg), and recently, she has been featured at festivals like Acht Brücken (Köln), Passion:SPIEL at the Deutsches National Theater (Weimar), and Music in Time at Spoleto Festival (Charleston). She is also a member of Opera Lab Berlin. Nina’s own projects include several duo collaborations. Departure Duo, a contemporary music soprano+double bass duo with Edward Kass, released its debut album Immensity Of on New Focus Recordings (NYC). Nina&Augustė, her improvisation duo with sound artist Augustė Vickunaitė, created a 22 hour radio piece for Radio Art Zone. In collaboration with artist Leonie Brandner, Nina made MOSSOPERA, a long duration installation opera for two voices, dictaphones, and ceramic resonators. In the last years, radio has become an important part of her practice, and her live comedy variety show, The Entertainment, is hosted by Cashmere Radio (Berlin) and supported by DMR Neustart Kultur.

George Lewis Tales of the Traveller

The London Sinfonietta commissioned this work for the instrumentation of Fausto Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip: Lesson II (1998-99), and an improvised solo part (“The Traveller”). The music for the ensemble is precisely notated; the Traveller’s solo part specifies entrance and exit points only, along with a few modest proposals: “Direct imitation of melodic or harmonic passages is to be avoided; use of noise (whatever that means in this context) is encouraged. Suggested strategies for dialogue with the written music include blending, opposition or contrast, and transformation.”

— George Lewis

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Genius Award (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently Prof. Lewis received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018).

Katherine Balch waste knot waste knot is a piece about leftovers and how to use them, a serenade to the lost or wasted time of this pandemic spell, to moments squandered by tangled spaces and the fickleness of memory. The text that guides the piece, by novelist Alexandra Kleeman, is an artifact of this period: scraps and sketches that will never be published but find a new home in musical abstraction.

Throughout the approximately 14-minute piece, soprano Nina Guo uses hand-held analog cassette tape recorders to capture musical moments. These collected memories are shared at the end of the piece, distorted, fragmented, and disordered, a reflection on Kleeman’s observation that while “we read from left to right or right to left,” “when we forget it begins evenly: the sense of a memory urgent but blurred, as if playing from another room...”

— Katherine Balch

The “spellbinding” (Seen and Heard International) music of composer Katherine Balch captures the magic of everyday sounds, inviting audiences into a sonic world characterized by imagination, discovery, and textural lyricism. Inspired by the intimacy of quotidian objects, found sounds, and natural processes, she has been commissioned and performed by leading ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, l’Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Minnesota, Oregon, Albany, Indianapolis, and Tokyo, while her work has been presented in major global venues including Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall.

Jack Sheen is a musical polymath, in demand as both conductor and composer, as well as a creator of dynamic cross-arts projects. At home in modern and contemporary music, he brings his compositional insight to interpretations of core repertoire that have been highly praised. His rare set of talents and passions drives a vision for the future of classical music, and he is an active force for change. Not yet 30, Sheen has already worked with leading orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Britten Sinfonia, Royal Northern Sinfonia, and Manchester Camerata. Last season he returned to the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic and London Sinfonietta, as well as serving as a Guest Artist at Tanglewood Music Centre.

His own music encompasses concert works for orchestras, ensembles and soloists, alongside immersive performance-installations that disperse live musicians, audio, film, and dancers around spaces such as galleries or warehouses. He has been commissioned by orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra,

Michel van der Aa Shades of Red

Shades of Red is a musical conversation about the colour red. Its four parts - Carmine, Magenta, Crimson, and Vermilion - each showcase a different tonal shade, and reaction-hierarchy between the instruments. The soundtrack extends and mirrors the sound of the instruments and functions as an alter ego of the acoustic sound, confronting the players with a warped version of their own playing. A special role is carved out for the Rhodes and Hammond keyboards, often creating rhythmical markings and impulses that shape the rest of the ensemble.

— Michel van der Aa

Michel van der Aa, winner of the 2015 Johannes Vermeer Award and 2013 Grawemeyer award, is a truly multidisciplinary figure in contemporary music. A unique voice, he combines composition with film, stage direction, and script writing. Classical instruments, voices, electronic sound, actors, theatre and video are all seamless extensions of his musical vocabulary. Before studying composition with Diderik Wagenaar, Gilius van Bergeijk and Louis Andriessen, van der Aa trained first as a recording engineer at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In 2002 he broadened his skills with studies in film direction, at the New York Film Academy, and in 2007 he participated in the Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab, an intensive course in stage direction.

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).

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Nina Guo soprano

Jack Sheen conductor