Sounds New -

Posted on: 19th Apr 2012

Music from some of the composers featuring at Sounds New next month coming up on Radio 3: three new pieces, commissioned as part of the New Music 20x12 for the Cultural Olympiad, and others can be heard on Radio 3’s Hear and Now this Saturday.

Anna Meredith’s HandsFree will be performed by the National Youth Orchestra, whilst Sally Beamish’s Spinal Chords, with actress Juliet Stevenson as narrator, is played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment . The Manchester Chorale and Black Dyke Mills Band perform Luke Carver Goss’ Pure Gold: a 4X4 Relay Race, with the inimitable tones of Ian Macmillan (he of The Verb fame) narrating.

Also in the programme: Harrison Birtwistle and Colin Matthews.

At Sounds New next month, Sally Beamish’s Kyle: song for solo piano can be heard in a lunchtime concert on Thursday 10 May, whilst Harrison Birtwistle’s Grimethorpe Aria is performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in Canterbury Cathedral on Saturday 12 May.

Here’s Sally Beamish talking about the inspiration behind Spinal Chords.

The Hear and Now programme will then be available on iPlayer for a week.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 28th Mar 2012

Coming to Sounds New this season on Wednesday 9 May in the Powerplant concert, Graham Fitkin is also one of the composers associated with this year’s London Olympic Games and the New Music 20x12 project. 

His piece Track to Track: the Athlon premièred at the Cadogan Hall last Thursday, performed by the Fitkin Band and the London Chamber Orchestra, setting words by the poet Glyn Maxwell. The piece was written to be broadcast on the 'Javelin' train, as it travels between King's Cross and the Olympic arena.

The New Music 20×12 project has commissioned a twelve-minute piece from each of twenty British composers, including Jason Yarde, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Sally Beamish and Howard Skempton, with the latter’s Five Rings Triples launching the project when it rang out over the rooftops of Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey on New Year’s Eve. 

Fitkin’s music is full of vibrant energy, bright textural writing and a punchy rhythmic sense that drives the music onwards in an exciting, exuberant  fashion, whether it's the robust quartet-writing of Vent, the orchestral shimmying of Bebeto, the percussion power-play that is Hook or the multi-piano texture of Loud:

There’ll be more about Graham Fitkin on the blog here later, in a preview of the Powerplant concert in which his Chain of Command will be performed: in the meantime, here’s the composer talking about his Olympic piece:

Track to Track will be pulling in to St Pancras on June 27. Don’t miss Chain of Command on May 9 at Sounds New.

Posted by Daniel Harding.