19 – 26 May 2017 valeofglamorganfestival.org.uk
today’s new music tomorrow’s classics
PENARTH – ALL SAINTS CHURCH, PENARTH PIER PAVILION BARRY – VICTORIA PARK, BARRY ISLAND EWENNY – PRIORY CHURCH CARDIFF – BBC HODDINOTT HALL, ST DAVIDS HALL, SHERMAN THEATRE
valeofglamorganfestival.org.uk Founded in 1969 by composer, John Metcalf, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival is at the forefront of contemporary music promotion in Wales. Now in our 48th year, we have an established reputation for bringing together an international line-up of composers, artists and ensembles and introducing audiences to music from the four corners of the globe. We are unique in the UK as the only classical music festival dedicated to the music of living composers. Over the years we have explored in depth the music of the likes of Steve Reich, Ross Edwards, Philip Glass, Giya Kancheli, Galina Grigorieva, Howard Skempton, Qigang Chen, Graham Fitkin, Sebastian Currier and Arvo Pärt. Along the way, we have often
taken the opportunity to feature at the same time the music of their fellow countrymen and women. As a result, the festival has developed a truly international outlook, delving into the musical sound worlds of Australia, China, Estonia, Denmark, Latvia, Mexico and many other countries.
FESTIVAL MANAGEMENT
Life Friends
Artistic Director John Metcalf General Manager Jennifer Hill Marketing Cathy Morris Press Claire Willis & Jessica Sparkes (ElevenTenths) Technical Manager Chris Wicks Concerts Assistant Tony Best
Wyn Howells John Metcalf
Festival Office: 204 Cyncoed Road, Cardiff, CF23 6BQ vogfestival@sky.com www.valeofglamorganfestival.org.uk Registered in Wales No 1862934 Charity No 519044 VAT No GB 331 0709 00
Council of Management David Williams (chair) Robert Fokkens Councillor Eric Hacker Tracey Harding Councillor Fred Johnson Deborah Keyser David Lermon Michael Trickey
Founding Friends Sir Alan Cox Richard Griffiths Mr & Mrs Colwyn Jones Mr & Mrs McLaggan Rosamund Shelley
please note that
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Denis Ellis Wyn Howells David & Val Lermon Mathew Prichard Alan Shenton
obile phones M must be switched off prior to performances
The taking of photographs is not permitted
Programme design: savageandgray.co.uk 6686-17
The Festival gratefully acknowledges support from:
2017 Festival Friends & Donors Peter Bamfield, Peter Bowen, Howard Cheesman, Leslie & Elizabeth Collins, Ken Griffin, Bette Griffiths & Biddy Dimond, Simon & Sian Heilbron, Bill & Rita Hales, Mark Hevesi, Wyn Howells, Colwyn & Pamela Jones, Lyndon Jones, James Lawson, Emma Lawton, David & Val Lermon, Domini Lipman, John & Jenny Morris, Peter McGuffin & Anne Farmer, Suzie Morel, Paul & Jane Motte, Jeremy Points, Dick & Beverly Tonkin, Elizabeth Walker & Vincent Devine, David & Gillie Williams.
Peter Reynolds Composer Studio Support Circle With thanks to the following for their generous support of this programme: Peter Bowen Howard Cheesman Leslie & Elizabeth Collins Kenneth Griffin Bette Griffiths Peter McGuffin & Anne Farmer David & Gillie Williams
Commissioning Support Circle With thanks to the following for their generous support of this programme: Howard Cheesman Simon & Siân Heilbron Lyndon Jones* David & Val Lemon The recording of concerts is not permitted. It is illegal to record any performance, or part thereof, unless prior arrangements have been made with the Vale of Glamorgan Festival
Our concerts are held in a range of distinctive venues across the Vale of Glamorgan and Cardiff. These range from stateof-the-art concert halls to ancient churches and castles. With our policy of presenting only the works of living composers we are delighted that many are able to join us during the festival itself.
Copyright of text and programme notes is the property of the individual authors
Peter Reynolds Composer Studio
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We have been aware for many years of the potential for connecting emerging composers with the many remarkable composers and performers that come to Wales for the Vale of Glamorgan Festival. Although there are already a number of such schemes in existence we felt that the particular mix we have on offer would make for a very special opportunity. So with the help, encouragement and support of Cardiff University School of Music we have established a composer studio to run concurrently with the Festival.
The Studio will be in two separate modules. We have invited the following composers to take part in 2017
They will benefit from an exciting few days of workshops, seminars, one-to-one sessions with visiting composers and attendance at rehearsals and concerts.
Nathan Dearden
In each module there will also be an opportunity for composers to hear a read-through and archival recording of a short work played by ensembles who are taking part in the Festival. These sessions are open to the public.
Jordan Hirst William Marsey Anselm McDonnell Lucy McPhee Sam Messer David Roche Yfat Soul Zisso
Works by Nathan Dearden, William Marsey, Lucy McPhee and David Roche can be heard at St. David’s Hall on Monday 22nd May at 2.00pm performed by Grand Band from New York. Works by Jordan Hirst, Anselm McDonnell, Sam Messer and Yfat Soul Zisso can be heard at Cardiff University School of Music on Friday 26th May at 2.30pm performed by the Marsyas Trio.
The Composer Studio has been named in celebration of our great friend and colleague Peter Reynolds who passed away suddenly at the end of last year. Peter was a highly original composer whose works display a huge depth of knowledge of musical literature. He was not only highly informed but had a unique artistic perspective as well. These qualities, too, were evident in his work as a teacher, a role he discharged with great gentleness and generosity of spirit. He had a long connection with the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and at the time of his death was working on a special commission for the 2017 Festival of a car horn fanfare. We’re proud to honour his life and work by naming the new Composer Studio for him.
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Music Theatre Wales & Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru
Friday 19 May, 7.30pm* Saturday 20 May, 7.30pm
Sherman Theatre, Cardiff CF24 4YE Y Tŵr Guto Puw
Composer
Gwyneth Glyn
Libretto
Caryl Hughes
Female
Gwion Thomas
Male
Richard Baker
Conductor
Michael McCarthy Director Samal Blak
Designer
Ace McCarron
Lighting Designer
Sung in Welsh with English surtitles *World premiere
6.30pm Pre-performance Talks 19 May: Dr Rhiannon Williams in conversation with Guto Puw, Gwyneth Glyn, Arwel Huws and Ffion Haf 20 May: G eraint Lewis in conversation with Guto Puw and Ffion Haf Both pre performance talks will be in Welsh with translation facilities available
Guto Puw & Gwyneth Glyn
Y Tŵr
Synopsis
Y Tŵr explores the extremes of human emotion experienced by two lovers over the course of a lifetime. It is abundant in the depth and intensity of feeling that opera demands. Y Tŵr is at once an intimate story of betrayal and disillusionment, and the same time a metaphor for any male-female relationship with all its complexities and paradox. Its dual nature, personal and universal, particular and timeless, lends itself naturally to opera. The tension that drives the original play is that between fantasy and reality; between what is and what might have been. I believe the medium of opera could explore and expose this tension to its full capacity.
Act I – Summer. Daytime. A young couple in the first flush of love.
Gwyneth Glyn
The young woman enters the tower, reluctantly followed by her boyfriend. She is impetuous but He is hesitant, and they start to work out how to be together, how to love and how to see life through to the end. They promise to be honest to each other. After a storm, He dreams about owning a fast motorbike, which She misinterprets as a sexual fantasy. She then talks about a dream she has about a butterfly flying through a field and landing on someone’s face. After they make love, and a train passes outside, She wants to go up the stairs, to the next level, but He resists until She reveals she is pregnant.
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Act II – Autumn. Dusk. Middle-age. They return from dinner with His boss, DJ. He is a bit worse for wear and boasts about his close relationship with DJ, before accusing Her of flirting with the boss. They both seem bitter and disappointed with life. Time continues to pass. A train is heard in the distance. They share fleeting memories and She wonders if their son Gwyn will visit. He focusses on his work but ultimately receives the news that he has lost his job. He feels utterly useless and hopeless, but She is preparing to go out. He lashes out at Her and finds DJ’s lighter in her things – She has been having an affair with his boss. Enraged, He attempts to rape Her then goes up the stairs, leaving Her staring after him.
INTERVAL Act III – Winter. Faint light. Old-age. It is snowing. The signs of old age are increasingly evident. They start to recall the past and share the promise they made to each other at the start of their lives together, not to lie to each other when the time comes. She asks him to end her life with dignity. To cheer things up, He puts out the Christmas decorations and they start to enjoy happy memories, but He collapses. Waking from her own nightmare
about the butterfly, She offers him some simple food and comforts him with thoughts about returning to Torremolinos. He is fading fast, and She feeds him with tablets to ease him on his way. After He dies he rises from his body, no longer burdened by life. For the third time, She hears a train pass in the distance.
Guto Puw (b.1971, Bala) Guto Puw studied composition at Bangor University with composers John Pickard, Andrew Lewis and Pwyll ap Siôn and became a full member of staff in 2006. He is Artistic Director of the Bangor New Music Festival, which has been running since 2000. He first made an impact as a composer in 1995 when he won the Composer’s Medal at the National Eisteddfod (and again in 1997). Since then he has received many commissions and performances while being much in demand as a composer at various festivals in the UK and abroad. In 2007 his Concerto for Oboe won the BBC Radio 3 Listeners Award and ...onyt agoraf y drws... (...unless I open the door...) won the BBC Music Magazine’s Best Proms Premieres. In 2016 his Violin Concerto – Soft Stillness was premiered by Madeleine Mitchell and BBC National
Orchestra of Wales as part of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival. Y Tŵr is his first chamber opera. Future commissions include a second violin concerto, a string quartet and a large orchestral work.
Gwyneth Glyn (b.1979, Bangor) Gwyneth Glyn is a poet, writer and singersongwriter who lives in Criccieth, North Wales. She was Welsh Poet Laureate for Children 2006-2007 and has written extensively for theatre in Wales, including pieces for Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, Bara Caws, Y Frân Wen, De Oscuro and Music Theatre Wales’s production of Stori’r Milwr/The Soldier’s Tale. Gwyneth writes regularly for Welsh soap opera Pobol y Cwm. She has performed internationally at WOMEX, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Washington DC, and at Folk Alliance International in Kansas City. In 2015 she supported Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita on his UK tour, and recently collaborated with musicians from Mumbai on an album called Ghazalaw, which weaves Welsh folk songs with Indian Ghazal. She is currently recording her next solo album. www.gwynethglyn.com
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John Adams – The Complete Piano Works
Saturday 20 May, 2.30pm All Saints Church, Penarth CF64 3EH Robin Green piano Mei Yi Foo piano John Adams
Phrygian Gates
22’
John Adams
Hallelujah Junction
17’
John Adams
China Gates
5’
John Adams
American Beserk
6’
interval
20’ John Adams Roll Over Beethoven** arr Preben Antonson ** UK Premiere
Robin Green Mei Yi Foo
John Adams Phrygian Gates (1977) China Gates (1977) Phrygian Gates and its little companion piece, China Gates, are products of a critical period in my career as a composer. Together they comprise what could be my “opus one” by virtue of the fact that they appeared in 1977-78 as the first coherent statements in a new language. Several earlier pieces from the 1970s, American Standard, Grounding and some tape compositions, seem in retrospect to be inventive but still searching for a means of holding themselves together. Phrygian Gates shows a strong influence of Minimalist procedures, and it is for sure the first piece of mine to be based on the idea of repetitive cell structure. Not only the American Minimalists, but the lesser known English practitioners like Howard Skempton, Christopher Hobbes and John White were on my mind during the composing of this piece. The 1970s was a time of enormous ideological conflict in new music when the assumptions of post-Schoenbergian aesthetics finally began to be challenged by composers who saw little future in the principles of serialism. I for one saw an equally bleak future in John Cage’s methods which struck me as also too grounded on rationalist and formalist principles. Making compositional decisions by consulting the I Ching did not seem all that far removed from making them
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by consulting a tone row. Minimalism, although an admittedly reduced and at times naive style, offered me a way out of this bind. I found the combination of tonality, pulsation and large architectonic structures to be extremely promising. Phrygian Gates shows in as clear a way possible how I approached these potentials of Minimalism. Paradoxically it also reveals the fact that from the start I was already searching for ways to convolute and enrich the inherent simplicities of the style. The phrase, often attributed to me, that I was “a Minimalist bored with Minimalism”, was the remark of another writer, yet it was not far from the mark. Phrygian Gates is a 22-minute tour of half of the cycle of keys, modulating by the circle of fifths rather than stepwise à la WellTempered Clavier. The structure is in the form of a modulating square wave with one state in the Lydian mode and the other in the Phrygian mode. As the piece progresses the amount of time spent in the Lydian gradually shortens while that given over to the Phrygian lengthens. Hence the very first section, on A Lydian, is the longest in the piece and is followed by a very short passage on A Phrygian. In the next pair (E Lydian and Phrygian) the Lydian section is slightly shorter while its Phrygian mate is proportionally longer, and so on until the tables are turned. Then follows a coda in which the modes are rapidly mixed, one after the other. “Gates,” a term borrowed from electronics, are the moments
when the modes abruptly and without warning shift. There is “mode” in this music, but there is no “modulation”. What makes Phrygian Gates still interesting for me is the topography of its form and the variety of keyboard ideas, many of which suggest the rippling of waveforms. Sometimes these waves are smooth and tranquil; sometimes their surging and stabbing figurations can be as violent as a white-water expedition. In most cases I treat each hand as if it were operating in a wave-like manner, generating patterns and figurations that operate in continuous harmony with the other hand. These waves are always articulated by short “pings” of sound, little signposts which mark off the smaller internal units in a ratio of roughly 3-3-2-4. Phrygian Gates is a behemoth of sorts and requires a pianist capable of considerable physical endurance and with an ability to sustain long arches of sound. China Gates, on the other hand, was written for young pianists and utilizes the same principles without resorting to virtuoso technical effects. It too oscillates between two modal worlds, only it does so with extreme delicacy. It strikes me now as a piece calling for real attention to details of dark, light and the shadows that exist between. © John Adams (reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com)
John Adams Hallelujah Junction (1998) Hallelujah Junction is a small truck stop on Highway 49 in the High Sierras on the California-Nevada border near where I have a small cabin. For years I would pass through in my car, wondering what piece of music might have a title like “Hallelujah Junction.” It was a case of a good title needing a piece, so I obliged by composing this work for two pianos. Two pianos is a combination that’s long intrigued me, and the pairing plays important roles in both Common Tones in Simple Time and Grand Pianola Music. What attracts me is the possibility of having similar or even identical material played at a very slight delay, thereby creating a kind of planned resonance, as if the sonorities were being processed by a delay circuit. The brilliant attacks and rich ten-fingered chords of the grand pianos suggest endless possibilities for constructing an ecstatic, clangorous continuum, the effect of which could not be achieved with any other sonorous instrument. I begin with only the “__lle-lu-jah” of the title (a Hebrew word), a threesyllable exclamation that bounces back and forth between the two
instruments until it yields to a more relaxed and regular figuration of rolling 16ths. The harmonies are essentially modal, staying exclusively in the flat regions of the circle of fifths. Eventually the rambling, busy patter of 16ths gives way to a passage of dry, “secco” chords that punctuate the musical surface like karate chops until they too give way, this time to the serene middle movement. Here the “__lle-lu-jah” motif of the opening is gently transformed and extended above a quiet fabric of repeated triplets. These triplets become the main event as the movement tightens up and energy increases, leading into the final section. Here I take advantage of the acoustically identical sounds of the two pianos to make constant shifts of pulse (“Is it in two? Or is it in three?”). This ambiguity produces a kind of giddy uncertainty as the music pings back and forth in bright clusters. The final moments of Hallelujah Junction revel in the full onomatopoeic possibilities of the title. We get the full four syllables—the “Hallelujah”—as well as the “junction” of the by-now crazed pianists, both of them very likely in extremis of full-tilt boogie.
Hallelujah Junction was composed for my friends Grant Gershon and Gloria Cheng, who first performed it at the Gerry Center in Brentwood, California in April of 1998. It was dedicated to Ernest Fleischmann, for many years the guiding light of musical culture in Los Angeles. © John Adams (reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com)
John Adams American Beserk (2001) American Berserk was written for Garrick Ohlsson and clearly takes advantage of his astonishing technical abilities and sonic power. It is a piece that has many resonances with earlier American piano music, specifically that of Ives and Nancarrow. It is spiky, rhythmically unpredictable, at times jazzy, and flavoured with ragtime and bop. Although only six minutes long, it demands exceptional pianistic abilities in the areas of rhythmic control and rapid chordal movement. The title is suggested by a phrase in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. But unlike the Roth novel, which is largely elegiac and meditative, American Berserk is extroverted, punchy, and fundamentally good-natured. © John Adams (reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com)
Hilary Tann
Alice Neary
Matthew Jones
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Photo: Vern Evans
of short phrases from two late Beethoven works, the Piano Sonata Opus 110 and the Diabelli Variations, to generate an absorbing twentyminute structure that, in Adams’s words, “takes these tiny musical fractals through a grand tour of a harmonic and rhythmic hall of mirrors.”
John Adams
Photo: Kaupo Kikkas
Robin Green
Mei Yi Foo
John Adams arr Preben Antonson Roll Over Beethoven (2014/2016) “You know my temperature’s risin’ and the jukebox blows a fuse.” Chuck Berry’s “heart beatin’ rhythm” was a paean to the life force of rock ‘n roll, and for American composer John Adams the pulse that drives the music of Beethoven is no less hot. Adams’s two-piano work Roll Over Beethoven takes potent fragments of two late Beethoven piano works and processes them in the unique black box of his own transformative musical language. As he did once before in his recent Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra, Adams pays homage to the electric vitality of Beethoven’s intensely physical, expressive world while constructing his own unpredictable musical forms that alternate between moments of delicate lyricism and hard driven, virtuoso brio. Roll Over Beethoven, a keyboard version of Adams’s 2014 Second Quartet, employs just a handful
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Davos Young Artists Festival, the International Musicians Seminar ‘Open Chamber’ Festival at Prussia Cove, the Pharos Trust and the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier. He has had artist residencies at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and at St John’s Smith Square, London.
John Adams (b. 1947, USA)
As a concerto soloist, Robin has performed with the European Union Youth Orchestra, Sinfonia Cymru, Camerata Nordica, Orchestra Vitae and Melos Sinfonia.
Composer, conductor, and creative thinker—John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes.
Robin is the artistic director of the Fort Belan Chamber Festival that brings together some of Europe’s leading chamber musicians. A passionate chamber musician, Robin has collaborated with Gordan Nikolitch, Valeryi Sokolov, Michael Collins, Bogdan Bozovic, Thomas Carroll, Rolf Hind, Christian Elliott and Llŷr Williams.
Works spanning more than three decades have entered the repertoire and are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music, among them Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, Chamber Symphony, Doctor Atomic Symphony, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and his Violin Concerto. His stage works, all in collaboration with director Peter Sellars, include Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), El Niño (2000), Doctor Atomic (2005), A Flowering Tree (2006), and the oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012). His new opera, Girls of the Golden West, set during the 1850s California Gold Rush, will receive its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in November 2017.
www.robingreenpiano.com
Adams’s 70th birthday is feted around the world during the 20162017 season, with anniversary highlights including residencies with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Orchestre de Lyon, and special programming focuses with the St. Louis Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Houston Opera, The Barbican, Philharmonie de Paris, and ZaterdagMatinee. Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes. www.earbox.com
Robin Green Robin Green enjoys a busy career as a soloist, chamber musician and conductor. He has performed recitals in many of the world’s most important concert venues including the Wigmore Hall and the Vienna Musikverein. His festival appearances have included the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Interlaken Classics Festival,
Mei Yi Foo A prolific concert performer, Mei Yi has appeared with the Philharmonia Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, London Chamber Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Fort Worth Symphony, Bretagne Symphony, Remix Ensemble and the Malaysian Philharmonic, garnering rave reviews from The Times, Independent, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, SRF broadcast, Guardian and Klassik. She works regularly with living composers including Dai Fujikura, Richard Baker, Chris Harman and Unsuk Chin, and appears at Berlin’s Ultraschall Festival, Punkt Festival in Norway, Schoenberg Centre, Southbank’s Park Lane Group, Poznan Spring and Das Neue Werk in Hamburg. Mei Yi’s new season will include performances with Sinfonia Varsovia, Porto Symphony Orchestra, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra and as Philharmonia Orchestra’s featured artist for the series ‘Music of Today’. Mei Yi currently holds a teaching position at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. She also enjoys working in chamber music partnership with Dimitri Ashkenazy, Nicolas Dautricourt, Shlomy Dobrinsky, Patricia Kopatchinskaya, Antti Siirala, Hugo Ticciati, Matthew Trusler, Bartosz Woroch and Ashley Wass. During her free time, Mei Yi can be found scuba diving in the depths of South East Asia. www.meiyifoo.com
Onyx Brass Sunday 21 May Informal Performances 10.30am 12.00noon 3.30pm Concert 4pm
Penarth Pier Victoria Park, Barry Barry Island Gardens
James Maynard
Fanfare
3’
Stuart MacRae
Two Cairns
7’
Joe Duddell
Still Life
8’
Guto Puw
New work for Fairground Organ and Brass Quintet* 8’
Tim Jackson
Extract from Anything But 3’
John Adams
China Gates arr. David Gordon Shute*
Michael Berkeley Music from Chaucer
Eastern Shelter, Barry Island
Please note: Limited seating will be available for the short performances. Bring your most colourful deckchair or cushion if you want to guarantee a seat.
5’ 12’
*World Premiere
In the event of bad weather please check our website for updates on planned performances and venues.
James Maynard Fanfare (1996)
Joe Duddell Still Life (2001)
Tim Jackson Extract from Anything But
Fanfare was written in 1996 for a Brass Quintet tour of Spain, and exploits both the declamatory and lyrical qualities of Onyx Brass. The work can be heard as the title track on their CD Trisagion.
The title Still Life, whilst being a term borrowed from painting, refers to the two temporal states of the piece, status and motion, which are juxtaposed and superimposed throughout.
We have not supplied any programme notes for this piece for reasons that will become clear in performance.
Stuart MacRae Two Cairns (2009)
The static sections often lead into chorallike music, one of the references to Bach in the piece, which was commissioned by the Harper Ensemble for the 250th anniversary of his death. The other principle reference comes in the trumpet’s opening figures which relate to material found in one of Bach’s harpsichord concertos.
A cairn is a pile of rocks erected as a memorial, often added to over the years by those wishing to pay their respects. It may also mark the summit of a hill, or the route of a path. In Two Cairns, which Onyx Brass commissioned in memory of their friend John Price, the two parts mark different ways of remembering: the first is contemplative and plangent, revolving around the same set of minor chords; the second is celebratory and vital, fracturing into layers of trills before turning to a more wistful chorale at the end. For most of the piece the ensemble is divided into two groups - high and low - but the closing chorale unites the ensemble in a gesture of reconciliation.
John Adams
arr. David Gordon Shute
China Gates (1977/2017) See page 6 for programme note
© Joe Duddell
© Stuart MacRae
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Michael Berkeley Music from Chaucer (1984)
Stuart MacRae (b.1976, Inverness)
Tim Jackson (b.1972, Preston)
i ii iii iv v
Stuart MacRae has established himself as one of the most distinctive composers of his generation, writing music of elemental power and emotional subtlety. His works include a Violin Concerto (2001), Hamartia for cello and ensemble (2004), and Gaudete for soprano and orchestra (2008), all of which have been performed at the BBC Proms. Works for the stage include the dance-opera Echo and Narcissus (2007) and the operas Ghost Patrol (2012) and The Devil Inside, both collaborations with writer Louise Welsh for Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales.
Tim Jackson is currently principal horn with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. At the age of fifteen Tim was awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. He was a member of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for five years and now performs as guest principal horn with orchestras throughout the UK and Europe. He has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Manchester Camerata and the London Mozart Players. Timothy is Composerin-Association with Onyx Brass, and has received commissions from groups as diverse as the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, British Telecom, and the Hallé Orchestra.
Triton’s Trumpets The Grieving Queen The Fanfare for the Huntsmen The Sorrowful Knight The Wakeful Poet
When Michael Berkeley wrote his Music from Chaucer it was in answer to a dual request: he had been commissioned by the BBC to write some incidental music for a radio version of Chaucer’s dramatic work, and had also been invited by Philip Jones to write a quintet for his ensemble. The resulting work is in five movements of widely differing character. The first, Triton’s Trumpets, which acts as an overture to the suite of pieces, is mainly rather rustic and, as its title implies, much of its music is in the nature of fanfares. The Grieving Queen is a haunting slow waltz, introduced by an anguished phrase from the horn. The Fanfare for the Huntsmen is very short and very vigorous. In the fourth movement, The Sorrowful Knight, each instrument expresses its individual sorrow, at first alone and then corporate in counterpoint. In the music for the final movement, The Wakeful Poet, Chaucer himself chatters in a jaunty, innocent style. © Michael Berkeley Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
Stuart’s music has been performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Edinburgh International Festival, and by ensembles including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble, Hebrides Ensemble, BCMG and London Sinfonietta, as well as numerous orchestras. Stuart was Composer in Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 1999 to 2003. He was resident composer at the Spannungen Kammermusikfest in Heimbach, Germany in 2003, and Edinburgh Festival Creative Fellow at the University of Edinburgh from 2005 to 2006. From 2006 to 2007 he was a resident composer at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany. www.stuartmacrae.com
James Maynard As well as being a composer, James Maynard plays the trombone in the London Symphony Orchestra. His compositions tend to lean towards brass music, having written a number for Onyx Brass. His commissions include works for Onyx Brass, London Symphony Orchestra, the Brighton Festival and Peter Moore. He writes, “In my music I am trying to open up the expressive possibilities of brass chamber music, with Onyx Brass being the perfect vessel for this”.
Joe Duddell (b. 1972, Manchester) Joe Duddell lists among his influences Tippett, Stravinsky, Joy Division, New Order and Nick Drake. Poised and understated, Duddell’s music has a classical feel with a melancholic undertow; perhaps best described as 21st century baroque. Duddell has written a number of works for percussionist Colin Currie, including Snowblind and a Percussion Concerto, Ruby. He has also collaborated with pop band Elbow and the Hallé Orchestra, and dubstep-group Nero and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. He works closely with the Steve Martland Band and currently holds the position of Professor of Music at Bath Spa University. Duddell’s music has been recorded on NMC, Onyx, Telarc and FMR. www.joeduddell.co.uk
Guto Puw (b.1971, Bala) See page 5 for biography
Onyx Brass
John Adams (b.1947, USA) See page 8 for biography
Michael Berkeley (b.1948, London) Michael Berkeley studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Michael’s music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world’s finest musicians. Most of Michael’s significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas are available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. For ten years from 1995 Michael was Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. He currently presents Radio 3’s Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and is Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet. www.michaelberkeley.co.uk
Onyx Brass Niall Keatley Alan Thomas Andrew Sutton Peter Moore David Gordon-Shute
trumpet trumpet horn trombone tuba
Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2018, Onyx Brass continues to be the leading light in establishing the brass quintet as a medium for serious chamber music, presenting it in the entertaining and articulate style that has become the group’s trademark. BBC Music Magazine described the group as “easily the classiest brass ensemble in Britain”, and Gramophone hailed “some of the most thrilling chamber brass-playing of its kind”. Education is a large part of the remit of Onyx Brass: workshops and master-classes range from primary school to the Juilliard School. The group is currently resident ensemble of Imperial College, University of London. During 2014, Onyx Brass toured the country, bringing contemporary brass music to bandstands, parks and public spaces with a project called Tour de Brass! – part of the PRSF New Music Biennial. www.onyxbrass.co.uk
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Grand Band Residency St David’s Hall, Cardiff CF10 1AH MONDAY 22 MAY, 2PM
TUESDAY 23 MAY, 10.30am
Grand Band Workshop
A Concert for Primary Schools
An open rehearsal in which Grand Band perform and record compositions specially written for them by participants attending the Peter Reynolds Composer Studio.
Nathan Dearden
Steve Reich
6 pianos
20’
William Marsey
Kate Moore
Sensitive Spot
16’
Lucy McPhee
John Metcalf
Never Odd or Even
5’
David Roche
Ben Wallace
A Road You Can Go
13’
Presented by composer, actress and animateur, Helen Woods, this fun and educational concert will be a visual and aural treat for everyone.
MONDAY 22 MAY, 6PM
Grand Band Open Rehearsal
TUESDAY 23 MAY, 8pm
Grand Band
A chance to access rehearsals normally closed to the public as Grand Band prepare for their concerts on 23 May. This replaces the masterclass for pianists previously advertised.
Paul Kerekes
Free
Philip Glass Closing
Grand Band
wither and bloom
14’ 5’
Ben Wallace
Fryderyk Chopin’s Psychedelic Technicolor ‘lectro-Funk-Core Superstarlit Ultra-Throwdown on Op. 28 No. 4*
David Lang
face so pale
10’
John Metcalf
Never Odd or Even
5’
Steve Reich
Six Pianos
20’
*World Premiere 7pm Meet the Artists Steph Power in conversation with Grand Band and Ben Wallace The Festival would like to thank the Schoenhut Piano Company for their generous sponsorship and supply of the toy pianos featured in Grand Band’s performance for schools. www.toypiano.com Grand Band
Paul Kerekes wither and bloom (2014/15)
Ben Wallace
I have always been really attracted to Renaissance and Baroque music and the performance practice associated with their styles. There’s a quality of the voice within every gesture, as if everything required breath, even the “non-breathing” instruments. The result is a diminishing relationship between the notes - a strong to weak shape that, to me, has always moulded the music in a very natural and expressive way. My piece explores the gesture through the piano, a naturally decaying instrument itself. The phrases travel throughout the ensemble to illustrate a distancing effect through shifting location, notes are struck and sustained with the pedal allowing them to ring and
die away, and music travels from high to low to portray a quality of withering over the piano’s expansive range. When I was asked to write a complimentary movement to wither, my first thought was to do the opposite and base the piece on growth. In bloom, the shape is concerned with accumulation, which you’ll hear most directly through an increase in volume and amount of pianos playing across each phrase, but perhaps less obvious is expansion. The main theme begins by alternating two notes back and forth and gradually adds one note at a time to the mix until a larger arpeggiated chord is reached. To me, this musical idea reminded me of time-lapse videos of plants or flowers unfurling. © Paul Kerekes
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Philip Glass Closing (1981) Closing is the final movement of Glassworks - arranged here by Grand Band. Glassworks was Glass’s debut record on CBS. This music was written for the recording studio, though a number of the pieces soon found their way into the Ensemble repertory. A sixmovement work, Glassworks was intended to introduce his music to a more general audience than had been familiar with it up to then. Each movement can be performed separately
Ben Wallace Fryderyk Chopin’s Psychedelic Technicolor ‘lectro-Funk-Core Superstarlit UltraThrowdown on Op. 28 No. 4 (2017) It took me a very very, very long time to figure out what this piece would be about. The final result is a sort of groovy set of variations ... kind of ... on a little E minor Prelude by Chopin. I was originally working on an arrangement of a tune from the 2012 indie video game Fez which was going to incorporate the Chopin prelude because it’s included in the game’s soundtrack. But eventually, the game music faded away and I realised it would be much more interesting to just let go of my inhibitions and write this ridiculous dance music. The piece isn’t programmatic or representative of anything, but for the last couple of days, I had this image of Chopin dressed up like the guys from Daft Punk spinning out this crazy music in a nightclub somewhere. © Ben Wallace
David Lang face so pale (1992) One’s first idea about writing for six pianos might be that almost all eighty-eight notes can be sounding at the same time. With all those possible notes, what’s a composer to do? I often try to do quite a lot less than is possible. I’m sure part of this is just mischievousness, but I also truly believe that concentrating on only one narrow performance aspect can make possible a musical intensity that a more expansive piece might overlook. My piece orpheus over and under (1999) for two pianos used single-
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note tremolos to create a kind of nervous singing quality. For Piano Circus I wanted to go further with this idea of creating a nervous vocal tradition. The top of the fifteenth-century charts was Guillaume Dufay’s ballade Se la face ay pale (‘If my face is pale’). My piece face so pale takes Dufay’s famous love song, subjects it to numerous pulling and stretching procedures, and divides the original three parts among the six pianos. The result is a bizarre equilibrium between the spaciousness of the actual music and the stuttering mechanism by which it is made. face so pale was commissioned by Piano Circus and received its premier at the Huddersfield Festival. © David Lang
John Metcalf Never Odd or Even (1995) Never Odd or Even was commissioned by the six piano ensemble Piano Circus in 1995, and first performed at Symphony Hall in Birmingham and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. In writing the piece I wanted to apply the strictest musical procedures to apparently inconsequential material in order to achieve a blend of great rigour and extreme lightness. As the title implies, Never Odd or Even is a palindrome (something which is the same backwards as it is forwards) or, to put it more accurately, a series of musical palindromes. Pianos 2 & 5 share a chord sequence which contains a clearly audible series of harmonic palindromes. Pianos 1 & 4 have a series of decorative rhythmic palindromes in the upper register of the keyboards. These rhythmic palindromes also operate as strict canons. Finally, 3 & 6 each have a simple legato line in octaves in the lower register, making a single melodic (and rhythmic) palindrome. This palindrome is also heard in canon. All these palindromes, being of different lengths, are phased so that the material is always heard in new relationships. The title, itself a palindrome (hence the grammatical error), refers both to the predominantly melodious nature of the piece and to the fact that Pianos 2 & 5, who provide the core material for the piece, play always either in straight syncopation or using multiple rhythms - 3 against 2, 4 against 6, 5 against 4, 9 against 8, etc. Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas! www.johnmetcalf.co.uk
Steve Reich Six Pianos (1973) Six Pianos grew out of the idea I had to do a piece for all the pianos in a piano store. The piece which actually resulted is a bit more modest in scope since too many pianos (especially if they are large grands) can begin to sound thick and unmanageable. Using six smaller grands made it possible to play the fast, rhythmically intricate kind of music I am drawn to while at the same time allowing the players to be physically close together so as to hear each other clearly. The piece begins with four pianists all playing the same eight-beat rhythmic pattern, but with different notes. The other two pianists then begin in unison to gradually build up the exact pattern of one of the pianists already playing by putting the notes of his fifth eight-note on the seventh eight-note of their measure, then his first on their third, and so on until they have constructed the same pattern with the same notes, but two eighth-notes out of phrase. This is the same process of substituting beats for rests as appears for the first time in Drumming, but here, instead of the process happening by itself, it happens against another performer (or performers) already playing that pattern in another rhythmic position. The end result is that a pattern played against itself but one or more beats out of phase. Though this result is similar to many older pieces of mine, the process of arriving at that result is new. Instead of slow shifts of phase, there is percussive build up of beats in place of rests. The use of pianos here is more like the sets of tuned drums. When these phase relationships have been fully constructed, one or two other pianists then double some of the many melodic patterns resulting from this four or five piano relationship. By gradually increasing the volume of these resulting patterns they bring them to the surface of the music, and by gradually fading out enable the listener to hear these patterns, and hopefully many others, pre-existing in the ongoing four or five piano relationship. The decisions as to which resulting patterns were most musical, and what their order would be, were made by James Preiss, Steve Chambers and myself during rehearsals. This process of rhythmic construction followed by doubling the resulting patterns is then continued in three sections marked by changes in mode, key, and a gradually higher position on the keyboard, the first being in D major, the second in E dorian, and the third in B natural minor. ©Steve Reich
Paul Kerekes (b. USA) Paul Kerekes is a New York based composer and pianist whose music has been described as “gently poetic” (The New York Times), “striking” (WQXR), and “highly eloquent” (New Haven Advocate). He has had the privilege of hearing his pieces performed by many outstanding ensembles, some of which include the American Composers Orchestra, Da Capo Chamber Players, and New Morse Code, in such venues as Merkin Hall, (le) poisson rouge, and The Winter Garden. He has also attended notable programs such as the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and the Young Artists Piano Program at Tanglewood. Paul is also a member of Grand Band, a six piano ensemble that has been featured in such events as the Bang on a Can Marathon and the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. He has received awards from ASCAP, the Academy of Arts and Letters, and was the recipient of the 2015 JFund award from the American Composer’s Forum. He is a graduate of Queens College and Yale School of Music and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. www.paulkerekes.com
Philip Glass (b.1937, USA) Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. His operas play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theatre and Academy Award-winning motion pictures. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously. Whilst his musical style has been dubbed “minimalism”, Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based
on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops. www.philipglass.com
Ben Wallace (b. USA) Described as “Brilliant, humorous, and rhythmically complex,” (Tacoma Symphony Blog) Ben Wallace is a composer, percussionist, and keyboard player hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ben’s music spans a wide range of styles from chamber and orchestral, to disco and samba, and occasionally into the video game remix world. He has worked with organisations such as Musical Theatre Southwest, The Amadeus Chamber Orchestra, Grand Band, and Music & Cocktails, hearing his works performed in New York, Tacoma, Utah, New Mexico, New Haven, San Francisco, Switzerland, and Beijing. He is a founding member of DiscoCactus, a VGM remix band, and INVISIBLE ANATOMY, an ensemble of hybrid composer/performers. He received his Bachelor of Music from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati in both Composition and Percussion, studying primarily with Allen Otte and Joel Hoffman. He then received his Masters of Music from the Yale School of Music in Composition, where he studied with David Lang, Chris Theofanidis, Martin Bresnick, and Aaron Kernis. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at the Yale School of Music.
David Lang (b. 1957 USA) Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorisation, constantly creating new forms. In the words of The New Yorker, “With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” Many of Lang’s pieces resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber,
and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling, and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike. www.davidlangmusic.com
John Metcalf (b.1946, Swansea) John Metcalf is a leading Welsh/ Canadian composer who has composed major works in many musical forms. While his cultural roots are in the heart of Wales, his work has a broad international following and is represented in a substantial catalogue of recordings. In 2009 he received one of four inaugural Creative Wales Ambassador Awards from the Arts Council of Wales. The awards recognise artists’ achievements, their standing in the arts in Wales and their capacity to push the boundaries of their art inherently as form and as a point of contact with contemporary Wales. This award led to the composition of his seventh opera based on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, an international co-commission from the Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, Le Chien Qui Chante, Montreal and Companion Star, New York. The opera was premiered to great critical and audience acclaim in April 2014. The production toured Wales and was showcased in New York following its premiere at the Taliesin. 2016 highlights included a performance of his monumental Cello Symphony by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with soloist Alice Neary and concerts by Ensemble MidVest from Denmark which included several of his chamber works. Ensemble Cymru with guest artist Elisa Netzer (harp) toured his Septet in May and a second recording of the same work was released towards the end of the year with the Belgian harpist Rachel Talitman. A new Sextet for Piano and Winds - in the form of four palindromes - commissioned by the Fishguard Festival was premiered in July by pianist Peter Donohoe and London Winds. In Her Majesty the Queen’s 2012 New Years Honours List John was awarded an MBE for services to music. www.johnmetcalf.co.uk
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Reich’s music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics; London, San Francisco, Boston, and BBC symphony orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Kronos Quartet; Ensemble Modern; Ensemble Intercontemporain; Bang on a Can All-Stars; and eighth blackbird. Several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylían, Jerome Robbins, Wayne McGregor, and Christopher Wheeldon. Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey and Hawkes www.stevereich.com
Grand Band has been described by The New York Times as “a kind of newmusic supergroup” and “the Traveling Wilburys of the city’s new-music piano scene”. Labelled “awesome” by Sequenza 21 and ‘inventive’ in New York Magazine, this stunning collection of performers creates a powerful sonic force.
Photo: Vern Evans
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steve Reich’s music has been influential to composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. He is a leading pioneer of Minimalism, having in his youth broken away from the “establishment” that was serialism. His music is known for its steady pulse, repetition, and a fascination with canons; it combines rigorous structures with propulsive rhythms and seductive instrumental colour. It also embraces harmonies of nonWestern and American vernacular music (especially jazz). His studies have included the Gamelan, African drumming (at the University of Ghana), and traditional forms of chanting the Hebrew scriptures.
Grand Band Vicky Chow David Friend Paul Kerekes Blair McMillen Lisa Moore Isabelle O’Connell
A modern and unconventional troupe, Grand Band champions new music, living composers and arrangements of 19th and 20th Century classics. Their recent commissions include new works by composers Michael Gordon, Paul Kerekes, Missy Mazzoli, and Ben Wallace. Grand Band repertoire also includes original works by David Lang, Philip Glass, John Metcalf, Kate Moore, Steve Reich, Kevin Volans and Julia Wolfe and arrangements of classics by Modeste Mussorgsky, Gustav Holst and Leonard Bernstein. Broadcast regularly on New York’s WQXR’s Q2 radio, Grand Band has performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon, (le) poisson rouge, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Lansdale Community Concerts (PA), Rite of Summer Festival (NY) and in the UK in both Sheffield and Liverpool.
Paul Kerekes
Ben Wallace
Photo: Kaupo Kikkas
Steve Reich (b. 1936, USA)
David Lang
John Metcalf
Steve Reich
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Apollon Musagète Quartet
WEDNESDAY 24 MAY, 7.30pm
Penarth Pier Pavilion, CF64 3AT
4.30pm Pre-concert Walk Meet at Penarth Pier Free accompanied walk around Penarth in the company of the Vale of Glamorgan Walking Festival. The walk lasts 1½ hours at a slow to moderate pace.
6.30pm Pre-concert Talk Penarth Pier Pavilion Keith Potter introduces the music of John Adams
Krzysztof Penderecki Quartet No. 3 Leaves of an unwritten diary (2008) Written to celebrate his 75th birthday, Penderecki’s third string quartet is a single movement work consisting of five short sections of contrasting tempi and character. It stands in sharp contrast to his first two quartets which date back to his avant-garde period. The work begins with a dark, screaming melody in the viola which gives way to a driven vivace theme which recurs throughout the piece. From this emerges a lopsided waltz followed by a poignant and sweetly singing nocturne. Towards the end of the piece, a gypsy melody appears born from the composer’s childhood memory of his father playing the violin. Following an intense passage in which all the previously heard themes collide, the work finishes in introspective mood with a soft return of the gypsy melody.
AMQ Multitude Multitude was composed by all four members of the Apollon Musagète Quartet. Described as a homage to Witold Lustoslawski, the players have drawn on his stylistic language. Through a kaleidoscope of events it explores various techniques and
Apollon Musagète Quartet
Krzysztof Penderecki
Quartet No. 3 Leaves of an unwritten diary
AMQ Multitude
25’ 6’
INTERVAL John Adams
displays the possibilities of a quartet working as a whole whilst at the same time made up of individuals with strong artistic personalities.
John Adams John’s Book of Alleged Dances (1991) 1. Judah to Ocean 2. Toot Nipple 3. Dogjam 4. Pavane: She’s So Fine 5. Rag the Bone 6. Habanera 7. Stubble Crotchet 8. Hammer and Chisel 9. Alligator Escalator 10. Standchen: the Little Serenade The Alleged Dances were the next pieces written after the Violin Concerto, a complex work that took a full year to compose. The Concerto emboldened me to go further with string writing, and some of the techniques and gestures I’d touched on in it appeared again in the new string quartet, only in a less earnest guise. The “Book” is a collection of ten dances, six of which are accompanied by a recorded percussion track made of prepared piano sounds. The prepared piano was, of course, the
John’s Book of Alleged Dances
35’
invention of John Cage, who first put erasers, nuts, bolts, and other damping objects in the strings of the grand piano, thereby transforming it into a kind of pygmy gamelan. In the original version of Alleged Dances the prepared piano sounds were organised as loops installed in an onstage sampler, and one of the quartet players triggered them on cue with a foot pedal. This made for a lot of suspense in the live performance— perhaps too much, as the potential for crash-and-burn was so high that Kronos eventually persuaded me to create a CD of the loops, a decision that allowed for significantly less anxiety during concerts. The dances were “alleged” because the steps for them had yet to be invented (although by now a number of choreographers, including Paul Taylor, have created pieces around them). The general tone is dry, droll, sardonic. The music was composed with the personalities of the Kronos players very much in mind. The little pavane, She’s So Fine, for example, is expressly made for Joan Jean Renaud’s sweetly lyrical high cello register, and the hoe-down, Dogjam, honours David Harrington’s bluegrass proclivities. ©J ohn Adams (reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com)
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Krzysztof Penderecki (b.1933, Poland) Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) has visited a wide range of compositional styles and genres. His early successes included prize-winning works in Poland. In his late-twenties and earlythirties, he then became internationally well-known for his complex, “tonalitystretching” works. Such compositions include the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima and the Passion According to St. Luke. The experimental techniques of such works include glissandos (pitch slides), note clusters, unpitched sounds, speech, and chance-based effects. Five of Penderecki’s orchestral works from 196174 were notably used in Stanley Kubrick’s major motion-picture (1980) of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining (1977). Similarly, David Lynch has also used some of the composer’s works. In the 1980s, ‘90s, and 2000s, Penderecki generally explored a style that used updated approaches to such traditional compositional elements as melody and harmony. However, his later compositions are still often difficult, chaotic, and/or “demonic.” His works have included the Grawemeyer Awardwinning Symphony No. 4 (“Adagio”), the vocal/choral Symphonies No. 7 and 8, numerous additional orchestral and vocal/ choral works (such as his Agnus Dei), four operas (including The Devils of Loudon
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and Paradise Lost), various concertos, solo instrumental works, and chamber music. The latter includes his two early string quartets (1960-68) and his much later String Quartet No. 3 (2008). He has received numerous awards and honours. www.krzysztofpenderecki.eu
John Adams (b.1947, USA) See page 8 for biography
Apollon Musagète Quartet Paweł Zalejski violin Bartosz Zachłod violin Piotr Szumieł viola Piotr Skweres cello Winner of first prize and several other awards at the International Music Competition of the ARD in 2008, the Apollon Musagète Quartet has rapidly become an established feature of the European musical scene, captivating public and press alike. The quartet studied with Johannes Meissl at the European Chamber Music Academy and was inspired by the musicians of the Alban Berg Quartet at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Recent engagements have taken the quartet to the Auditori Barcelona, Carnegie Hall New York, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Wigmore Hall London and Tonhalle Zurich, among others. Highlights for the 2016/17 season include re-invitations to Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, London, Lucerne and Warsaw as well as debuts at Festspielhaus BadenBaden, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, Handelsbeurs Concertzaal Gent and at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Furthermore, the quartet is going to perform at the Festival de Música in León and is part of a ballet production of Staatstheater Nürnberg and a production of the Berlin performance group Nico and the Navigators. www.apollon-musagete.com
Krzysztof Penderecki
Marsyas Trio
THURSDAY 25 MAY, 7.30pm
Ewenny Priory, Bridgend CF35 5BW Marsyas Trio
3.30pm Pre-concert Walk Meet at Ewenny Priory Free accompanied walk in the company of the Vale of Glamorgan Walking Festival. The walk lasts 1½ hours at a slow to moderate pace. Not suitable for those with mobility issues.
Elisenda Fábregas
Voices of Inside Night 6’ from Voices of the Rainforest
Judith Weir
Several Concertos
17’
Hilary Tann
In the Theatre of Air*
18’
INTERVAL Steph Power and ante*
16’
Chen Yi
Night Thoughts
10’
Cecilia McDowall
Not just a place
7’
*World Premiere
Marsyas Trio
3.30pm Pre-concert Walk Meet at Ewenny Priory Free accompanied walk in the company of the Vale of Glamorgan Walking Festival. The walk lasts 1½ hours at a slow to moderate pace.
Elisenda Fábregas Voices of Inside Night from Voices of the Rainforest (2007) Voices of Inside Night is the fourth movement from Voices of the Rainforest - a loose representation of a day in the life of the rainforest in Papua New Guinea. This work came about as a result of my lifelong fascination and love for nature and a request from Christiane Meininger. A recording of actual sounds of insects, birds, and the singing of natives of the Papua New Guinea rainforest was the final inspiration for this work. The expressiveness of the alto flute reflects on the mystery of the rainforest night and the quiet sorrow of the creatures within. © Elisenda Fábregas
Judith Weir Several Concertos (1980) i Concerto for Violoncello ii Concerto for Pianoforte iii Concerto for Piccolo Several Concertos consists of three movements, in each of which one instrument assumes the role of soloist, whilst the other two instruments are laced in the background of the music. In the first movement, Concerto for Violoncello, the cello moves in and out of a fast, high texture set up by the flute and piano. Next comes the Concerto for Pianoforte, in which the piano part combines detailed and delicate passage work with the traditional huge virtuoso piano-playing style. The soloist is instructed to execute the considerable number of wide note clusters in the movement by “placing the relevant limbs carefully and ceremoniously on the keys as if in an oriental martial art”. Finally, in the Concerto for Piccolo, the piccolo is given music of a more relaxed and lyrical character than is normal in Western classical piccolo music. The second half of the movement, in which the piccolo, marked cantabile, is accompanied by tremolando muted cello and damped
6.30pm Meet the Composers Ewenny Priory Rian Evans in conversation with Steph Power and Hilary Tann
piano, was inspired by a recording of Rumanian music for the pan-pipes. Several Concertos, commissioned by Lontano with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain, was written during 1980 and first performed in Dundee in 1981. © Judith Weir
Hilary Tann In the Theatre of Air (2017) In the Theatre of Air was commissioned by the Marsyas Trio with funds provided by the Fidelio Charitable Trust and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust. Seven images of birds in flight underlie the composition. In order, these images are: Herons (“in the black, polished water”), Goldfinches (“they swing on the thistles”), Thrushes (“upward like rain, rising”), Wild Geese (“high in the clean blue air”), Hawk (“eyes fastened harder than love”), White Owl (“a buddha with wings”), and Starlings (“like one stippled star”). The titles and short phrases are taken from poems by Mary Oliver in her collection Wild Geese (Bloodaxe World Poets 2). Each sound-image is closely aligned with the poet’s resonant word-image. ©Hilary Tann
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Steph Power and ante (2017) When John Metcalf proposed I write a piece based on some aspect of walking, I immediately thought of the millions of refugees being forced to flee their homelands on foot; of people endlessly trudging, bearing the burden of unimaginable trauma, coupled with fears for those left behind and a seemingly paradoxical hope for the future. At the time, I happened to be re-reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy; which of course is not a comedy in the modern sense at all but tells of a visionary journey through the realms of hell, purgatory and paradise. But I wasn’t so much struck by any immediate or obvious resonance with the refugees’ plight as by a deeper, structural allegory: Dante had invented a verse form known as terza rima or ‘third rhyme’ for his prose-poem, in which each middle line of a group of three rhymes with the outer lines of the next triple group and so on, to interlock: ABA, BCB, CDC… This seemed a good description of walking forwards whilst periodically turning without stopping - to look behind; or, to put it another way, being conscious of the past in each present moment whilst projecting forwards into the future. Ideas for a piece based on such a structure quickly evolved - and for a trio, no less, containing flute and cello; instruments renowned for their singing qualities, which suggested further echoes of Dante’s division of his narrative into cantos (though my piece is in one movement, it does have ‘regions’, suggesting changing atmospheres or terrain). I was also reminded of the tradition in Romantic art of the wanderer; a lonely figure who appears in my piece as an entirely abstracted echo of two apparently antithetical composers, Schubert and Wagner. It was from their respective wanderer themes that I devised my pitch material, combining them into a sequence of notes which I transform in various, unrecognisable ways. Sound and resonance are as important as line or melody in the piece, in which an underlying slow, walking pace never varies, yet gives rise to a sense of changing internal pulses that come and go as the music moves inexorably forward; constantly turning back and in upon itself whilst rarely repeating exactly what’s gone before. So the title and ante contains - I’m afraid - a triple pun. ‘Andante’ is Italian for ‘walking pace’; ‘ante’ means ‘behind’ in Latin, hence ‘and behind’ - whilst the name Dante sneaks in there too. By the way, ‘Dante’ is derived from the word meaning ‘enduring’ in Italian.
Friday 26 May, 2.30pm
Cardiff University School of Music, CF10 3EB Marsyas Trio Open Rehearsal
Marsyas Trio perform works composed for flute, cello and piano, written specially for them by composers attending our Peter Reynolds Composer Studio. With works by:
The musicologist Richard Leppert has described tonality as offering an “(unsafe) safe haven” in a world liberated by dissonance. Those twin paradoxes seem apt on many levels in relation to the piece, which often travels through different tonal areas at the same time, and ends ambiguously. ©Steph Power
Chen Yi Night Thoughts (2004) Night Thoughts is described by the composer as a lyrical tone poem for flute, cello and piano. The inspiration for the music comes from the ancient Chinese Poem of the same name, written by the poet Li Bai in the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907). On couch bright moon shone, Thought frost on the ground, Raised head facing bright moon, Lowered head dreaming of home. (Translation by Chen Yi)
Cecilia McDowall Not just a place – Dark memories from an old tango hall (2007) In Buenos Aires, birthplace of the tango, there is an old tango hall just off the Avenida Corrientes which is known as ‘the street that never sleeps’. A faded sign hangs over the stage: ‘Salon Argentina – not just a place but somewhere to make friends.’ In the hall the dancers move under a dim light in grim, passionate embrace. In this homage to Piazzolla, the tango opens with an air of desolation and loneliness, but then gradually gathering itself into a dance of defiance. © Cecilia McDowall
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Jordan Hirst Anselm McDonnell Sam Messer Yfat Soul Zisso
Elisenda Fábregas (b.1955, Spain) Spanish/American composer Elisenda Fábregas began her musical studies at the Barcelona Conservatory before moving to the United States in 1978 when a postdoctoral Fulbright grant brought her to the Juilliard School. She earned another doctorate in music at Columbia University, and began composing in 1985, working with several dance companies and choreographers in New York City, including Jerome Robbins, Hector Zaraspe, Janet Soares, Anna Sokolow and the Maria the Benitez Spanish Dance Company. Her works have been commissioned and performed by numerous groups and soloists, including the Dale Warland Singers, Orchestra of Santa Fe and the Texas Music Teachers Association. Fábregas received the Shepherd distinguished Composer of the Year Award for 2001 from the Music Teachers National Association in Washington, D.C. Her music has been heard throughout the U.S. and in Mexico, Canada, Spain, Germany, The Czech Republic, Taiwan, Japan and China. She is currently based in Seoul, South Korea where she is a Visiting Professor of Music at Kyung-Hee University. www.elisendafabregas.com
Chen Yi
Judith Weir (b 1954, Cambridge) Judith Weir studied composition with John Tavener, Robin Holloway and Gunther Schuller. On leaving Cambridge University in 1976 she taught in England and Scotland, and in the mid-1990s became Associate Composer with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and Artistic Director of Spitalfields Festival. She was a Visiting Professor at Princeton (2001) Harvard (2004) and Cardiff (2006-13) and in 2014 was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music. In 2015 she became Associate Composer to the BBC Singers. She is the composer of several operas (written for Kent Opera, Scottish Opera, ENO and Bregenz) which have been widely performed. She has written orchestral music for the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony and Minnesota Orchestras. Much of her music has been recorded, and is available on the NMC, Delphian and Signum labels. www.judithweir.com
Hilary Tann (b.1947, Rhondda) Hilary Tann lives in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York where she is the John Howard Payne Professor of Music at Union College, Schenectady. She holds degrees in composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and from Princeton University. From 1982 to 1995 she held a number of Executive Committee positions with the International League of Women Composers. She was guest Composer in Residence at the 2011 Eastman School of Music Women in Music Festival and Composer in Residence at the 2013 Women Composers Festival of Hartford.
Steph Power
guest visits to Japan, Korea, and China. Her compositions have been widely performed and recorded by ensembles such as the European Women’s Orchestra, Tenebrae, Lontano, Meininger Trio, Thai Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, BBCNOW, and KBS Philharmonic in Seoul, Korea. www.hilarytann.com
Steph Power (b.1965, London) Steph Power is a composer, writer and critic living in mid-Wales. On graduating from York University with first class honours in 1987, she freelanced as a performer for several years (guitars/ percussion/narration), most notably with Icebreaker, Jane Manning’s Minstrels, Innererklang Music Theatre, Gemini and Lontano. More recently her music has been performed by Xenia Pestova, Yfat Soul Zisso, Explorations in Sound, Llŷr Williams, the Bridge Duo and PM Ensemble among others. A writer of sleeve notes for new music specialists NMC records, her articles, reviews and poetry have been published widely in diverse journals from Opera Magazine and TEMPO to Poetry Wales and Wales Arts Review, of which she is an editor. She is a critic for The Independent and The Stage, sits on the ISCM Wales advisory panel, and can sometimes be found holding forth on matters cultural for BBC Wales TV and radio. October 2017 sees the publication of The Music of Simon Holt (Boydell & Brewer), a major study to which she has contributed two chapters.
Marsyas Trio
Chen Yi (b.1953, China) A prolific composer, and recipient of the Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chen Yi blends Chinese and Western traditions, transcending cultural and musical boundaries. Her music has reached a wide range of audiences and inspired peoples of different cultural backgrounds throughout the world. Dr. Chen’s music has been performed and commissioned by the world’s leading musicians and ensembles, including Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, the Cleveland Orchestra, the BBC, Seattle, Pacific, and Singapore Symphonies, the Brooklyn, NY, and LA Philharmonic, Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Dr. Chen is a strong advocate of new music, American composers, Asian composers, and women in music Chen Yi is a cultural ambassador who has introduced hundreds of new music compositions and a large number of musicians from the East and the West to music and education exchange programs in the US, Germany, the UK, and Asian countries. She believes that music is a universal language; improving understanding between peoples of different cultural backgrounds and helping to bring peace in the world.
Praised for its lyricism and formal balance, her music is influenced by her love of Wales and a strong identification with the natural world. A deep interest in the traditional music of Japan has led to private study of the shakuhachi and
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Cecilia McDowall (b.1951, London) Cecilia McDowall has won many awards and been seven times short-listed for the British Composer Awards. In 2014 she won the British Composer Award for Choral Music. Much of McDowall’s choral music is performed worldwide, as well as her orchestral music. Recent important commissions include one for the BBC Singers, Westminster Cathedral Choir, London Mozart Players and a joint commission from the City of London Sinfonia and the Scott Polar Research Institute to celebrate the life of the British Antarctic explorer, Captain Scott in Seventy Degrees Below Zero. Three Latin Motets were recorded by the renowned American choir, Phoenix Chorale; the Chandos recording, Spotless Rose, won a Grammy award and was nominated for Best Classical Album. Recent commissions include works for the BBC Singers, Choir of King’s, Cambridge and a new song cycle for Roderick Williams, amongst others. Oxford University Press has signed McDowall as an ‘Oxford’ composer and she is currently ‘composer-in-residence’ at Dulwich College, London. In 2013 she received an Honorary Doctorate in Music from the University of Portsmouth. www.ceciliamcdowall.co.uk
Marsyas Trio Helen Vidovich flute Valerie Welbanks cello Zubin Kanga piano The Marsyas Trio takes its name from Greek mythology – a dedication to the pipe-playing satyr, Marsyas. Having dared to compete in a musical contest with Apollo, God of the Lyre, Marsyas won the contest but lost his life to the envious wrath of Apollo, saving his dying breaths for the instrument he immortalised. This mythology encapsulates the spirit and passion of becoming a musician. Since 2009, the Marsyas Trio has performed throughout the UK, Europe and Asia. Dedicated to music from the classical period to the present day, the Trio is also proactive in the commissioning of new music, with an aim to inspire a generation of new works for this chamber ensemble. The Marsyas Trio has appeared on Bulgarian National Television and Radio, and been broadcast on Dutch Radio Monalisa, and BBC Radio 3. Their 2014 commission from the British composer Laura Bowler was premiered as part of a cross-arts project at the Grimeborn Festival (Arcola Theatre, London), with shadow puppetry from Smoking Apples.
Cecilia McDowal
Hilary Tann
www.marsyastrio.com
Elisenda Fábregas
Judith Weir
valeofglamorganfestival.org.uk 20
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
FRIDAY 26 MAY, 7.30pm
BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff CF10 5AL
3pm Pre-concert Walk Meet at the Norwegian Church Free accompanied walk across the Cardiff Barrage in the company of the Vale of Glamorgan Walking Festival. The walk lasts 1½ hours at a slow to moderate pace.
Tecwyn Evans Conductor Paul Watkins Cello Sophie Westbrooke Recorder Apollon Musagète Quartet
John Adams
The Chairman Dances
13’
Huw Watkins
Cello Concerto
23’
INTERVAL Graham Fitkin Recorder Concerto* John Adams Tecwyn Evans
Absolute Jest
20’ 25’
*World premiere
6.15pm Meet the Artists BBC Hoddinott Hall Stephen Walsh in conversation with Graham Fitkin, Huw Watkins and Sophie Westbrooke Sophie Westbrooke
John Adams The Chairman Dances (1985)
Huw Watkins Cello Concerto (2016)
The Chairman Dances was an “out-take” of Act III of Nixon in China. Neither an “excerpt” nor a “fantasy on themes from,” it was in fact a kind of warm up for embarking on the creation of the full opera. At the time, 1985, I was obliged to fulfil a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony, but having already seen the scenario to Act III of Nixon in China, I couldn’t wait to begin work on that piece. So The Chairman Dances began as a “foxtrot” for Chairman Mao and his bride, Chiang Ch’ing, the fabled “Madame Mao,” firebrand, revolutionary executioner, architect of China’s calamitous Cultural Revolution, and (a fact not universally realised) a former Shanghai movie actress. In the surreal final scene of the opera, she interrupts the tired formalities of a state banquet, disrupts the slow moving protocol and invites the Chairman, who is present only as a gigantic forty-foot portrait on the wall, to “come down, old man, and dance.” The music takes full cognisance of her past as a movie actress. Themes, sometimes slinky and sentimental, at other times bravura and bounding, ride above in bustling fabric of energized motives. Some of these themes make a dreamy reappearance in Act III of the actual opera, en revenant, as both the Nixons and Maos reminisce over their distant pasts. A scenario by Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman, somewhat altered
I’ve been promising my brother a cello concerto for many years now. When I became composer in association with BBC National Orchestra of Wales, an orchestra with which we both have had long relationships, the concerto seemed to be the obvious piece to write first.
Paul Watkins
Paul’s wonderfully expressive, and deeply musical cello playing has been at the front of my mind while writing the piece. Perhaps this explains why the two outer movements are largely slow, with the lyrical qualities of the cello to the fore; although the central movement is, for the most part, a mercurial scherzo. © Huw Watkins
from the final one in Nixon in China, is as follows: “Chiang Ch’ing, a.k.a. Madame Mao, has gate crashed the Presidential Banquet. She is first seen standing where she is most in the way of the waiters. After a few minutes, she brings out a box of paper lanterns and hangs them around the hall, then strips down to a cheongsam, skin-tight from neck to ankle and slit up the hip. She signals the orchestra to play and begins dancing by herself. Mao is becoming excited. He steps down from his portrait on the wall, and they begin to foxtrot together. They are back in Yenan, dancing to the gramophone…” © John Adams (reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com)
Grahm Fitkin Recorder Concert (2017) I started sketching ideas for the Recorder Concerto in mid 2015 and completed the piece in early 2017. For me this is a particularly long period of gestation. Admittedly I was composing other pieces, but I think there were so many things to consider technically with this one - the nature of the solo instrument, its dynamics, the amplification, the number of possible solo instruments on offer and their respective ranges. After all it’s not an instrument I have an intimate knowledge of. And this was all before I got to deciding what sort of piece to write.
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It seemed important that the piece acknowledged the directness of airflow that a recorder produces, from performer straight through the tube, without anything getting in the way like a reed, or having to precisely angle the instrument or having to blow a raspberry down it. The lack of resistance seemed important in some way to me. So ‘breath’ became central to the work. After all it’s pretty central to all of us and without it things do change somewhat ... So in the piece there are different sorts of breathing cycles - the anticipatory inhale, the unwinding exhale, the breath which exudes effort, the breathing which post-effort slowly normalises and the breathing of calmness. It’s all pretty breathy. © Graham Fitkin
Graham Fitkin’s concerto was commissioned by Evelyn Nallen and Barbara Law, assisted by generous donations from the Society of Recorder Players and its members, and the Vale of Glamorgan Festival (with funds provide by The Hinrichsen Foundation).
John Adams Absolute Jest (2012) The idea for Absolute Jest was suggested by a performance by Michael Tilson Thomas of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a piece that I’d known all my life but had never much paid attention to until hearing MTT conduct it. Hearing this (and knowing that I was already committed to composing something for the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th anniversary) I was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky had absorbed musical artifacts from the past and worked them into his own highly personal language. But there the comparison pretty much ends. Stravinsky was apparently unfamiliar with the Pergolesi and other Neapolitan tunes when Diaghilev brought them to him. I, on the other hand, had loved the Beethoven string quartets since I was a teenager, and crafting something out of fragments of Opus 131, Opus 135 and the Grosse Fugue (plus a few more familiar “tattoos” from his symphonic scherzos) was a totally spontaneous act for me. “String quartet and orchestra” is admittedly a repertoire black hole—is there a single work in that medium that is regularly heard? And there are good reasons for why this is. The first is a simple issue of furniture: the problem of placing four solo players in the “soloist” position but still in front of the podium (so that they can follow the conductor) is daunting. The inner players, the second violin and viola, are frequently lost to the audience both visually and aurally. But placement on the stage aside, the real challenge is in marrying the highly charged manner and sound of a string quartet to the mass and less precise texture of the large orchestra. Unless very
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skilfully handled by both composer and performers, the combining of these two ensembles can result in a feeling of sensory and expressive overload. At its premiere in March of 2012 the first third of the piece was largely a trope on the Opus 131 C# minor quartet’s scherzo and suffered from just this problem. After a moody opening of tremolo strings and fragments of the Ninth Symphony signal octave-dropping motive the solo quartet emerged as if out of a haze, playing the driving foursquare figures of that scherzo, material that almost immediately went through a series of strange permutations. This original opening never satisfied me. The clarity of the solo quartet’s role was often buried beneath the orchestral activity resulting in what sounded to me too much like “chatter.” And the necessity of slowing down Beethoven’s tempo of the Opus 131 scherzo in order to make certain orchestral passages negotiable detracted from it vividness and breathless energy. Six months after the premiere I decided to compose a different beginning to Absolute Jest—a full 400 bars of completely new music, replacing the “quadrangular” feel of the Opus 131 scherzo with a bouncing 6/8 pulse that launches the piece in what is to my ears a far more satisfying fashion. The rolling 6/8 patterns recall the same Ninth Symphony scherzo but also summon up other references—of the Hammerklavier Sonata, of the Eighth Symphony and other archetypal Beethoven motives that come and go like cameo appearances on a stage. The high-spirited triple-time scherzo to the F major Opus 135 (Beethoven’s final work in that medium) enters about a third of the way through Absolute Jest and becomes the dominant motivic material for the remainder of the piece, interrupted only by a brief slow section that interweaves fragments of the Grosse Fugue with the opening fugue theme of the C# minor quartet. A final furious coda features the solo string quartet charging ahead at full speed over an extended orchestral pedal based on the famous Waldstein Sonata harmonic progressions. Absolute Jest had elicited mixed responses from listeners on its first outing. Quite a few reviewers assumed, perhaps because of its title, that the piece was little more than a backslapping joke. (One Chicago journalist was offended and could only express disgust at the abuse of Beethoven’s great music). There is nothing particularly new about one composer internalising the music of another and “making it his own.” Composers are drawn to another’s music to the point where they want to live in it, and that can happen in a variety of fashions, whether it’s Brahms making variations on themes by Handel or Haydn, Liszt arranging Wagner or Beethoven for piano, Schoenberg crafting a concerto out of Monn or, more radically, Berio “deconstructing” Schubert.
But Absolute Jest is not a clone of Grand Pianola Music or my Chamber Symphony. Of course there are “winks”, some of them not entirely subtle, here and there in the piece. But the act of composing the work (one that took nearly a year of work) was the most extended experience in pure “invention” that I’ve ever undertaken. Its creation was for me a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic transformation and formal design. The “jest” of the title should be understood in terms of its Latin meaning, “gesta:” doings, deeds, exploits. I like to think of “jest” as indicating an exercising of one’s wit by means of imagination and invention. © John Adams (reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com)
John Adams (b.1947, USA) See page 8 for biography
Huw Watkins (b.1976, Blackwood) Huw Watkins studied piano with Peter Lawson at Chetham’s School of Music and composition with Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr and Julian Anderson at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. In 2001 he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music. He now teaches composition at the Royal Academy of Music. He is one of Britain’s foremost composers and his music has been performed throughout Europe and North America. Huw’s works have been performed and commissioned by the Nash Ensemble, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Belcea Quartet, Elias Quartet, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. Huw is currently Composer in Association with BBC NOW.
Graham Fitkin (b.1963, Cornwall) Graham Fitkin lives in Cornwall. He composes for concerts, dance, film and digital media and runs his own ensemble of 9 soloists. He collaborates with musicians such as Powerplant, Nederlands Blazersensemble, Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott, Will Gregory, Piano Circus, Ensemble Bash and Sacconi Quartet. Graham often works with choreographers and dance companies including Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance, Pacific Northwest Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Bi-Ma, Sidonie Rochon, Munich Ballet and Royal Ballet. Recent works include Circuit, for soloists Kathryn Stott and Noriko Ogawa with BBC Philharmonic, a Cello Concerto for Yo-Yo
Ma, Still Warm for Ruth Wall, Lens for Janine Jansen at the Concertgebouw and Twenty Six Days for 10:10 at HCMF. There have been recent collaborations with Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon, Powerplant, Ruth Wall and the Royal Ballet and since 2007 he has been Resident Composer with London Chamber Orchestra. www.fitkin.com
BBC National Orchestra of Wales One of the UK’s most versatile orchestras, BBC National Orchestra of Wales is both a broadcast orchestra and Wales’s national symphony orchestra. Led by Principal Conductor Thomas Søndergård, Principal Guest Conductor Xian Zhang and Conductor Laureate Tadaaki Otaka, the orchestra is part of BBC Wales and supported by Arts Council of Wales. They perform a busy schedule of live concerts throughout Wales and the UK, as well as touring internationally, and perform annually at the BBC Proms. BBC NOW’s performances can be heard across the BBC on Radio, TV and online, and the orchestra records soundtracks for programmes such as Doctor Who. Inspiring children to get creative with music, learning is at the heart of the Orchestra’s work. www.bbc.co.uk/bbcnow
Tecwyn Evans After his studies in New Zealand Tecwyn Evans took up a Fulbright Scholarship to study conducting at the University of Kansas with Brian Priestman and Simon Carrington. From 2009-2011 he was Erster Kapellmeister und Stellvertreter des Chefdirigenten of Oper Graz, Austria. Tecwyn began his career as Chorus Master for Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1999, a position he held for four years. In 2005 Tecwyn was a finalist in the Leeds Conducting Competition. Soon after followed his debuts with the BBC Philharmonic, at the BBC Proms with the same orchestra, and at Opera North. Tecwyn has appeared in concert with many of the major UK orchestras as well as the Ulster Orchestra, Nordic Chamber, Helsingborg Symphony, Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester, Auckland Philharmonia, New Zealand Symphony, Christchurch Symphony and Queensland Symphony Orchestras. Last year Tecwyn made his debut with the BBC Singers and returns to the ensemble in 2017. Future plans include Carmen with Gothenburg Opera, concerts with Aalborg Symphony and conducting Danish National Opera’s 70th Anniversary Gala performances throughout Denmark. www.tecwynevans.com
Paul Watkins Acclaimed for his inspirational performances and eloquent musicianship, Paul Watkins enjoys a distinguished career as concerto soloist, chamber musician and conductor. He regularly appears as concerto soloist with orchestras throughout the world. Recent highlights include concertos with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Colorado Symphony, Hong Kong and Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestras, and appearances at the BBC Proms as conductor and soloist. A much sought-after chamber musician, Paul was a member of the Nash Ensemble from 1997 – 2013 when he joined the Emerson String Quartet. He performs regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and at festivals worldwide. He was the first ever Music Director of the English Chamber Orchestra and also served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra from 2009 – 2012. Since winning the 2002 Leeds Conducting Competition he has conducted many of the major orchestras throughout the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Huw Watkins
www.paulwatkinsmusic.com
Sophie Westbrooke
Graham Fitkin
Sophie studies recorder with Barbara Law at the Junior Royal Academy of Music. She is also in her final year as a music scholar at Sevenoaks School where she conducts and performs in several ensembles and choirs. She hopes to further her studies in music at university. In 2014, Sophie won the woodwind category of the BBC Young Musician competition on recorder. She regularly gives recitals in the UK and abroad, collaborating with musicians including David Gordon (harpsichord), Jamie Akers (lute) and 2012 BBC Young Musician finalist Charlotte Barbour-Condini (recorder). Highlights in the last year have included performing a recital at the Palazzo Bettoni in Italy and touring Germany and Belgium as a concerto soloist with the Lydian Orchestra. In her recorder playing, Sophie aims to expand awareness of the instrument through the performance of a wide repertoire of music from across the globe, using improvisation and different combinations of instruments. The programmes that she has performed in her recitals this year have ranged widely across medieval, renaissance, Baroque and contemporary pieces. Sophie can currently be heard performing the title music on the BBC TV series The Clangers. www.sophiewestbrooke.co.uk
Sophie Westbrooke
The Hinrichsen Foundation welcomes donations towards its work in support of contemporary music. Remembering The Hinrichsen Foundation in your will is an enduring way to mark your appreciation of its work and help secure its future. No gift is too small. If you are considering either a single donation or leaving a legacy to The Hinrichsen Foundation and would like to discuss this further, please contact Mrs Lesley Adamson at hinrichsenfoundation@ editionpeters.com or on 01644 430 104.
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