Sounds New -

Posted on: 14th May 2012

As the Festival draws towards its conclusion, time for a penultimate post to highlight two extraordinary pieces at the lunchtime concert by Workers Union.

An eclectic programme included Two Elegies Framing A Shout for soprano sax and piano, delivered with astonishing accomplishment by saxophonist Ellie Steemson and pianist Edward Pick. A lyrical first elegy for unaccompanied sax, requiring sustained control of lengthy phrases, is followed by the Shout, in which spiky gestures are punctuated by periods of tense silence, before opening out into a real tour de force for the saxophonist over restless piano riffs. The second Elegy is familiar from Turnage’s epic Blood on the Floor, a beautiful, jazz-hued movement with weaving melodic lines over rich jazz-inflected harmonies. Saxophonist Ellie Steemson demonstrated superb control of her performance, delivered with conviction and commitment and consummate lyrical skill. The piece as a whole is a fine riposte to all those who claim that ‘modern music has no melodies;’ next time you hear it, point them gently in its direction...

The programme also included Benjamin Oliver’s Ripped Up, for the complete six-piece ensemble.  Delicate opening piano chords lead into a driving groove pitching four-against-three rhythms; an elegiac episode interrupts with a cluster-chord, and showed some careful textural writing in the creation of some effective woodwind and percussion sonorities.  A ticking shaker sees time fragmenting in its erratic utterances, whilst the piano picks out some gossamer-thread shapes above hushed, low saxophone trills; but the rhythmic impetus is not to be denied, and returns with driving momentum. The faltering ticker interrupts once more, accompanied by haunting mobiles from the xylophone that fall across the barline, before a hesitant conclusion sees the piece finishing with wide-eyed expectancy.

A fascinating programme, delivered with real accomplishment by youthful former members of the Guildhall School. Expect to hear more from them, and from Benjamin Oliver in the future.

(And for anyone who couldn't make the concert, here they are performing the piece in concert last year.)

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 2nd May 2012

The first day of May saw me talking with Peter Cook, the Education Project Manager for Sounds New, jazz saxophonist, teacher, and self-styled ‘Fleet Commander’ (you’ll have to listen to the interview for the explanation for that one!).

The educational aspect of Sounds New is a crucial part of the festival’s mission, to engage younger audiences with contemporary music, to find ways in which they can participate in and respond to it. ‘’That’s really the big vision of Sounds New,’’ Peter remarks later in the interview, ‘’to really engage young people now in the music of our time, and for them to be the performers and composers [of tomorrow].’’ As he goes on to explain, different projects encourage people to respond in different ways to Sounds New, through not just music but other art-forms, as part of a wider remit in getting them thinking about contemporary music.

There’s a huge range of projects taking place as part of Sounds New’s educational outreach, with events unfolding all year round, feeding into, and developing ideas associated with, the festival itself.

Here, Peter talks about why helping to bring contemporary music to young audiences is important both to Sounds New and to him, and looks ahead to some of the events occurring this year.

You can find out about the ‘All for One’ series of educational concerts, as well as details about Worldwide Mothers’ Day at the Gulbenkian Theatre, in a previous post here.

With thanks to Peter.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 29th Apr 2012

The three winners of the 2011 International Composer Pyramid will each be having their work performed at Sounds New starting next Friday.

The London Sinfonietta and Diego Masson will be performing Edmund Finnis’ Frame/Refrain and Benjamin Oliver’s Momentum in the opening concert at the Marlowe Theatre on Friday 4 May; the programme also features George Benjamin’s magical at First Light and Maxwell Davies’ A Mirror of Whitening Light.

London-based Finnis has previously studied with Julian Anderson, and has written for the London Sinfonietta, the Spitalfields Music Festival and the British Film Institute.

Born in Chatham, Benjamin Oliver completed a doctorate at the University of Sussex, and is a lecturer at Southampton University.

He will also be conducting the ensemble Workers Union in a lunchtime concert at the festival on Monday 14 May, in which his piece ‘Ripped Up’ will appear.

Those renowned champions of contemporary music, the Arditti Quartet, will perform Victor Ibarra’s Crossing Lines as part of a concert on Monday 7 May, alongside works by Brian Ferneyhough , Thomas Ades and Robert Saxton. Born in Mexico, Ibarra studied in both Mexico and Paris, and has been commissioned in Mexico, Latin American and Europe; Ibarra has recently completed a Masters at the National Conservatory of Lyon. Here’s an extract from Ibarra’s Alice:

The ICP  ‘Call for Scores’ is adjudicated each year by a number of professional composers, with the unenviable task of sorting through the plethora of scores received from Europe and beyond; previous jurors have included Robert Saxton, Edwin Roxburgh, Rolf Hind and Paul Patterson. This year, the ‘Call for Scores 2012’ has received over seven hundred scores; a monumental task lies ahead of this year’s panel...

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 27th Apr 2012

Cornwall-born Graham Fitkin’s Chain of Command comes to Sounds New on Wednesday 9 May. Commissioned by Powerplant and toured by them in 2008, the percussionist uses a MIDI-marimba to trigger speech samples;

a technique Fitkin used with menacing political overtones in No Doubt, his concerto for MIDI-harp from 2010;

It’s a path well-trodden by Steve Reich, certainly, in pieces such as Different Trains and City Life, although for Fitkin, the speech samples are used less for their ability to generate particular pitch-sets than for their quasi-percussive texture; repetition heightens the sound of the sampled speech, treating it as an instrumental texture in its own right, although one not devoid of political syntax (both Chain of Command and No Doubt sample phrases from former American President George Bush).

Whether bristling with brash textures, bold rhythmic gestures, or with warm, lulling and hypnotic ostinati, Fitkin’s music refuses to fit into a neat pigeon-hole. There’s the exuberant vibrancy of Vent, for saxophone quartet, with its uplifting opening gesture; the piano-shop-gone-mad acrobatics of Sciosophy; the filigree harp textures of Skirting; Warm Area creates gentle pulsations, with melodic figures picked out in a delicate harp tapestry, in a piece occasionally reminiscent of the milder creations of Aphex Twin:

Here’s Fitkin at his punchy, rhythmic best in the soundtrack to a Uniqlo jeans advert:

Fitkin’s Cello Concerto, written for Yo-Yo Ma and premièred at the BBC Proms last year, has recently been nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, ‘for a large-scale work (scored for 16 or more players) receiving its first UK performance in 2011.’

Alongside Chain of Command in the Powerplant concert are works by the Hermit of Mexico, Conlon Nancarrow and a landmark collaboration with Gabriel Prokofiev, Import/Export: Suite for global junk.

Rich in textural contrasts, bursting with rhythmic verve and bright harmonies – the music of Graham Fitkin comes to Sounds New. Don’t miss it.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 26th Apr 2012

Gosh, Paul Patterson is a very busy man; catching up with Paul is something of a challenge, as he combines composing with a hectic schedule of teaching and travelling both around the country and abroad. I managed to do so yesterday when Paul was visiting Canterbury on one of his days teaching at Christ Church University, where he is Visiting Professor of Composition; the previous day, Paul had been teaching in Manchester; he recently attended a performance of his Magnificat in Paris, and on the day before the same piece is performed at Sounds New next month, he’ll be attending a performance in Swansea of his Little Red Riding Hood. A busy calendar...

Paul has been a significant figure on the British compositional landscape since the seventies, with a profusion of works ranging from a series of large-scale choral pieces to instrumental concerti, with youthful works such as the Sinfonia for Strings, with its bustling, energetic third movement full of rhythmic vitality;

His Mass for the Sea, written in 1983, combines movements from a traditional mass with reflections on the Biblical Flood from a variety of sources, and employs the bold structural device of replacing the usual ‘Credo’ with a meditation on the flood, full of high drama. Later works include Little Red Riding Hood for orchestra and narrator, the Cello Concerto, the Viola Concerto, and last year his String Quartet no.2; ‘Dances for Thaxted,’ using folk and dance melodies.

Formerly Head of Composition and Contemporary Music at the Royal Academy, Paul continues at the Academy as the Manson Professor of Composition, and is also the composer-in-residence with the National Youth Orchestra; as well as teaching at Christ Church, he is also Visiting Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music.

A rather rainy afternoon found us sitting in Paul’s office, where we talked about two of his compositions which are appearing at Sounds New this year; his Magnificat, which will be a part of the Choral Day on Sunday 6 May, and Timepiece, which the King’s Singers will be performing as part of the final concert in the festival, at the new Marlow Theatre on Tuesday 15 May. Commissioned by Sir David Wilcocks for the Bach Choir of London in 1993, the epic Magnificat is written for chorus, organ, brass and percussion and will be performed as part of a day-long celebration of British choral music, including amassed choirs from around the county. Timepiece, a commission from the King’s Singers in 1972, finds Adam getting into trouble when Eve sees him wearing a wristwatch, as Paul explains ...

To whet your appetites, here is the evocative ‘Sanctus and Benedictus’ from Paul’s 1983 Mass of the Sea.

I’m very grateful to Paul for finding the time to be interviewed, and for being such a pleasure to talk with: find out more about his pieces at Sounds New here (Magnificat) and here (Timepiece).

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 23rd Apr 2012

Sprite, by locally-born composer Patrick Nunn, appears at Sounds New in a lunchtime concert on Monday 7 May, performed by flautist Rosanna Ter-Berg.

Of the piece, Nunn himself writes: ‘Sprite was completed in November 1998 and is dedicated to my then six-month-old nephew. The piece portrays the playful and agile nature of a mythical sprite - qualities that I then associated with my wonderfully animated nephew. ‘

Here's Nunn's 21 Century Junkie, written for six pianos and tape; a whirlwind evocation of the frantic, information-consumption-driven pace of today’s lifestyle, a tapestry of samples drawn from everyday life is superimposed on a backdrop of minimalist-style piano textures. The piece was commissioned, and is here performed, by Piano Circus.

‘Earth,’ one of the movements from Music of the Spheres, combines skeletal piano textures with sounds collected by Voyager I and Voyager II distilled into sonic form: you can listen to it on YouTube here.

Shortlisted for the British Composers Awards in 2009, Nunn’s Prism is a lively, colourful piece for basset clarinet in A and piano, written in 2008 for (and here performed by) clarinettist Mark Simpson:

The concert at Sounds New next month, in which Sprite will be performed, also includes works by Jonathan Harvey, Emily Howard and Mark-Anthony Turnage; thanks to the Cavatina Ticket Scheme, the concert is free to those aged 25 and under (tickets on the door, subject to availability): a fantastic opportunity.

Details about the event online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 20th Apr 2012

John McCabe’s work is appearing twice at this year’s festival; the King’s Singers perform his highly evocative Scenes in America Deserta at the Marlowe Theatre on May 15, and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band bring Cloudcatcher Fells to Canterbury Cathedral on May 12.

McCabe’s recording of the complete Haydn piano sonatas for the Decca label is a bastion of the repertoire on disc, and (as a part of my father’s ridiculously eclectic record collection) was my first introduction to McCabe, as a pianist.

(A review of McCabe’s Haydn in Gramophone magazine declares ‘McCabe is a reliable guide: alive to the range and variety of it, scrupulously musical, communicative even when the page would lead one to wonder whether there was much to communicate.’)

Commissioned by the King's Singers, to whom it is dedicated and who gave the first performance in Houston, Texas, in 1987, Scenes in America Deserta demonstrates McCabe the composer is in command of a beautiful harmonic palette, and wide-ranging tonal colours; the textural writing is sure-footed, and the use of parts of the text and particular syllables to create wordless vocal effects is highly evocative. As McCabe himself says of the work, ‘the main aim of the music is to convey an idea of the variety and fascination which desert country holds for me.’ (Chester Novello website here).

The colours that emerge at the phrase ‘Everything that is not shadow is brilliant incandescent white,’ after the eerie siren-like beginning, in particular are simply breath-taking; the text later speaks of 'an utter blue beyond question and almost beyond description...’ but the tonal palette McCabe uses to clothe the imagery in the words comes hauntingly and effectively close. 

To whet your appetites, here’s the King’s Singers performing the piece at the BBC Proms.

Read McCabe’s commentary on Cloudcatcher Fells on the composer’s website here.

The King's Singers perform Scenes in American Deserta as part of their concert which closes this year's Sounds New Festival at the new Marlowe Theatre on Tuesday May 15.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

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: 13th Apr 2012

Wild, punchy and exhilarating, I first came across the music of Tansy Davies when she unleashed her Wild Card at the Proms in 2010, when a brooding bass clarinet skulked around the back of the texture in her brilliant orchestral piece. The work represents a journey through a deck of Tarot cards, and the opening ‘Devil’ card is full of implied menace as the bass clarinet looms and lurks underneath the orchestra.

Her music combines a brash and vibrant sound with strong jazz/funk-inflected rhythms in a manner reminiscent of her compatriot and 'Bad Boy' of British music, Mark-Anthony Turnage. Her spectrum of influences is huge, ranging from the chameleon of pop, Prince, to Ligetti, a vast deck contributing to an eclectic style which revels in its steadfast refusal to sit in a neat pigeon-hole.

Written for the Composers Ensemble, and first performed not a million miles away from Canterbury at the Dockyard Church, Chatham, her piece Neon is a lively, funky piece with that lurking bass clarinet again shadowing a punchy rhythmic feel, skirling Eastern-sounding woodwind lines and bristling with spiky electronic textures, like an updating of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, all combining to create a compulsive listening experience something akin to that of the devilish Chamber Symphony by John Adams.

Here’s an interview with the composer herself at the launch of her album ‘Troubairitz’ on the Nonclassical label in March last year.

Tansy’s piece Feather and Groove comes to Sounds New at the lunchtime concert with the COMA London Ensemble on Sunday 6 May, in a programme also including works by Michael Nyman and Jonathan Harvey: details online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 12th Apr 2012

George Benjamin’s At First Light comes to Sounds New on Friday 4 May, with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Diego Masson.

Written in 1982 for a fourteen-piece chamber orchestra, the work was inspired by JMW Turner’s painting Norham Castle: Sunrise. The piece was a commission from the London Sinfonietta, received the day after he had made his compositional Proms debut with a performance of Ringed by the Flat Horizon in 1980 at the tender age of twenty, making him the youngest-ever composer to be performed at the Proms.

An evocation of the emergence of the dawn, the piece is as richly-hued in both instrumental texture and timbral gesture as Turner’s painting is in colour-bound effects. The beautiful tone-colours at the beginning of the following excerpt (the last seven minutes) are ravishing in the extreme, almost impressionistic in their voluptuous, sensuous colouristic feel (mute trumpets and added-note minor chords make it sound almost Gil Evans-like at one point), building towards the climactic brass, piccolo and tam-tam cry towards the end, before a filigree-textured repeated gesture bursts into a shimmering, brash cry from brass and strings to bring an astonishing piece to its conclusion.

Ivan Hewitt, writing in the Telegraph at Benjamin’s fiftieth-birthday celebration concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall two years ago, observed that ‘Benjamin is a composer who keeps growing. We haven't heard the best of him yet.’ Surely an exciting prospect.

The concert at Sounds new on 4 May also features Maxwell Davies’ Mirror of Whitening Light and works by Oliver Knussen, Simon Bainbridge and others. Time to get very excited indeed.

See details of the complete concert online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 11th Apr 2012

One of the composers featuring in the Powerplant concert at Sounds New next month on Wednesday 9 May, composer Max de Wardener can be heard on Late Junction on Radio 3 tomorrow night.

A bass-player, composer, and graduate of the University of York and the Guildhall, de Wardener has written for film and television, and builds his own percussion instruments. Commissions have included works for the Elysian String Quartet and the London Symphony Orchestra, and he was one of four composers to be commissioned to write a new work in celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery.

Featuring cellist Oliver Coates in compositions using modified instruments, de Wardener can be heard in a session recorded exclusively for Late Junction.  He has previously appeared on Radio 3 on the former series Mixing It, back in 2005.

The broadcast will then be available on iPlayer for a week. Read more about de Wardener in a profile from the King’s Place website here.

De Wardener and Powerplant will be at Sounds New on 9 May: find out more here.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 10th Apr 2012

Sunday Mass at Canterbury Cathedral on 6 May features music by Jonathan Dove and Gabriel Jackson, both of whom have become stalwarts of contemporary British choral composition.

Dove’s musical language is at once vibrantly new and yet instantly accessible in a way that doesn’t compromise its individuality or descend into the saccharine. At home whether writing for the opera-house, community music projects or church services (his sublime Three Kings was commissioned for the 2000 Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s), compositions such as And The Day manage to sound at once modern and yet ageless. His Passing of the Year has become a popular addition to repertoire for large chorus, with its scintillating tonal colours, vibrant rhythms and lucid word-painting unfolding in a song-cycle depicting the changing seasons.

Amongst Dove’s choral works, his Seek  Him That Maketh the Seven Stars is a highly dramatic piece, with a dancing ostinato figure, which arranges a pentatonic chord into a sequence of rising fourths, in the organ depicting the shining stars, and an urgently repeating figure at the words ‘Seek Him’ from the choir. The piece exploits the tonal ambiguity inherent in a pentatonic set; initially organised to suggest A minor, by the end the set is re-aligned to create a tonal centre of C major, a brighter sonority reflecting the text as it turns ‘the shadow of Death into morning.’

A former chorister at Canterbury Cathedral himself, Gabriel Jackson has been composer-in-residence with the BBC Singers, for whom he has written such luminous pieces as the vivacious To Music and the quixotic Aeroplane Cantata for chorus and player-piano, an ode to the development of flight from Icarus to the aeroplane that, in its blistering, crazed player-piano accompaniment, is reminiscent of the music of Conlon Nancarrow.  Jackson’s exquisite setting of O Sacrum con vivium, which is being performed at the event, is a masterclass in the slow unfolding of text, clothed with a beautifully sustained tonal language.

Jackson’s musical language is instantly recognisable, and his evocative harmonic palette has contributed to his rising star in the world of choral composition. His Edinburgh Mass, commissioned by St Mary’s Cathedral, combines plainsong-style monody with Scotch-snap inflections, rich harmonic colours and deft gestural writing.

The opportunity to hear pieces by both composers next month, in the majestic setting of Canterbury Cathedral, promises to be a memorable occasion.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 7th Apr 2012

There’s a very moving Guardian interview with Jonathan Harvey, whose music was the subject of a  ‘Total Immersion’ celebration at the Barbican back in January, in which the composer reflects on his opera, Wagner Dream, written in 2007. He talks about the twin poles of his musical and spiritual selves: Wagner and the philosophy of Buddhism.

"I love Wagner's music. …When I was a teenager, that was what obsessed me, to discover how Wagner created these other places, these visions, in his music, to find where that power came from."

The concept of other places and visions is a thread that has run through Harvey’s compositional life, from his early days with Messiaen, his work at IRCAM, and to the most recent works which seem to look beyond this life to the promise of a transcendent afterlife.

Following an invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM, Harvey has worked with electronics and live sound; his experiments with electro-acoustic music at IRCAM led to Mortuos plango, vivos voco, in which the sampled sounds of a boy treble (Harvey’s own son) and the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral are subjected to a series of electronic transformations, such that the treble whizzes around and eventually becomes a part of the bell-sound; the entire pitch-set of the piece being derived from the thirty-three partials in the bell spectrum (Harvey writes about the piece here):

and a swathe of works in which electronic manipulation of live sounds becomes an additional sonic tapestry to the music (he is often cited by Spectralist composers, for whom sound is the pre-eminent aspect of composition, as a composer whose work hovers on the brink of spectral music). Harvey’s ravishing orchestra-meets-electronics soundworld is apparent in pieces such as the Madonna of Winter and Spring.

Harvey’s profound interest in Buddhism and eastern thought has inspired pieces such as Tranquil Abiding, which is especially beautiful, with the strings articulating a falling, two-chord gesture at the beginning that seems as though the ensemble is breathing (rather like the opening of Britten's Nocturne) in a meditative fashion:

Written in 2007 and first performed in Berlin in 2008, and given its UK première in Huddersfield only last year, Harvey’s Messages turns the entire chorus into angels; from the very opening gesture, in which a dulcimer appears to draw aside a veil into another world, the piece is a  mesmerising voyage through a litany of angels’ names for chorus and orchestra.

Speakings, also melding orchestra with live eletronics, was written whilst Harvey was composer-in-association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and depicts the evolution of speech through the sound of orchestral timbres, as though the ensemble itself is learning to communicate:

Harvey’s Nataraja for flute and piano appears as part of a concert at Sounds New on Monday 7^th May.

Bhakti, an exploration of hymns of the Rig Veda for ensemble and tape, also comes to Sounds New on Friday 11 May. Immerse yourself in Harvey's evocative visions of other places next month.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 4th Apr 2012

With exactly one month until Sounds New bursts into life in Canterbury, we’ll be marking the countdown to the beginning of the festival with a series profiling performers, composers and pieces appearing throughout the season, beginning with Sir John Tavener.

John Tavener regards The Veil of the Temple ‘as the supreme achievement of my life and the most important work that I have ever composed.’ Huge in concept, and in its original form lasting for seven hours, the piece is in eight sections, or ‘circles,’ like a gigantic prayer wheel with each cycle ascending in pitch, such that the entire work represents a tonal ascent beginning and ending in C.

Since his arrival on the musical scene in the late 60’s, with his oratorio The Whale launching the birth of the London Sinfonietta, Tavener has managed to achieve the difficult task of writing modern music that has a popular appeal, as choral pieces such as Song for Athene and The Lamb attest, as well as The Protecting Veil for cello and orchestra.

Tavener’s music exists in a kind of transcendent tonal landscape, which, like the music of his deeply religious compatriot, Jonathan Harvey, seems to be hovering on the verge of revelation, of opening the door to a nether-realm towards which the music constantly yearns.

Tavener’s deeply religious convictions saw him wanting to write a pan-theological work that moves beyond one single belief to include eastern ideas; as Tavener remarks,  ‘the music was deeply influenced by orthodox vigil services, but I wanted to go beyond Christianity and embrace Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism and the religion of the American Indians.’

Tavener’s vision for the entire piece is profoundly all-embracing:

''By the act of writing The Veil I understood that no single religion could be exclusive. The Veil has become light – there is no longer any veil. This tearing away of the Veil shows that all religions are in the transcendent way inwardly united beneath their outward form.''

Scored for soloists, large orchestra and a variety of exotic instruments including temple bowls and tam-tam, the version coming to Canterbury is the version the composer made to make it more readily able to be performed.

It’s become somewhat fashionable to deride Tavener’s music (perhaps, in part, a side-effect of his music’s popular appeal) as a sort of ‘Holy Minimalism,’ a glibly dismissive term which conveniently overlooks the profound convictions that have shaped Tavener’s writing and given them an unshakeable integrity. Tavener’s musical language may have a simplicity, almost a naivety, compared to the more complicated tonality of other modern composers,  or indeed since his own more avant-garde works from the 1970s, but that should in no way detract from the wonderful translucency of his harmonic language. His music is capable both of an almost diaphanous delicacy as well as impassioned outpouring, each an aspect of his musical vision.

The performance of this epic work in the reverential surroundings of Canterbury Cathedral on Friday 11 May will surely be a memorable occasion; the composer himself will be present.

To whet your appetite for Tenebrae’s performance at the Cathedral, here’s the choir performing Tavener’s intimate and timeless motet, The Lamb.

*citations from the composer’s own website here.

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.