‘Narcissus & Echo‘, the collaborative opera written by myself alongside Rachel Jackson, Jasmin Rodgman and Hannah Taylor was performed by Opera Viscera this week. I conducted the ensemble and cast first in Wednesday’s premiere at our rehearsal space, OPEN Ealing art gallery, London, then in two performances at the Secret Garden Party Festival in Huntingdon. The cast starred Hannah Eve O’Reilly as Narcissus and Sophie Levi as Echo, alongside chorus members Shoshana Pavett, Alexander Aldren, Jonny Hyde and Tim Elliott. Lia Alba directed, as well as playing Narcissus’ reflection.

There should be audio and possibly video of the show coming soon, but until that you can see some pictures of the rehearsal process and the premiere below.

A new collaborative opera is busy being developed, with music by me and three other composers, and will be premiered at the end of this month. Opera Viscera, the company co-founded by myself and director Lia Alba, are putting on a brand new opera entitled Narcissus & Echo – to be first performed at OPEN Ealing art gallery in London on the 20th July, then in the great outdoors at Cambridgeshire’s Secret Garden Party Festival on the 23rd and 24th.

The 35-40-minute opera employs six singers (featuring mezzo Janna Sutherland as Narcissus and soprano Sophie Levi as Echo), and is scored for flute, clarinet and string quartet. As music director, I have composed the first and last scenes (around 15 minutes of music in total), and have overseen the composition of three other scenes by fellow University of Manchester graduates Rachel Jackson, Jasmin Rodgman and Hannah Taylor. The music’s all completed now – while there are differing styles between the four composers there are unifying devices and dramatic structures that make the piece feel coherent. I can’t wait to start rehearsing…

In addition to the opera itself, Opera Viscera are putting on a number of events during our rehearsal period at the Ealing gallery. The process itself will be public, so people can come and see the set being built by our design team (that drawing at the top is a production sketch by the wonderful Miranda Keyes), and see some of the rehearsals. There will also be a children’s workshop on the 17th July run by our ensemble leader Sarah Hill, as well as opera screenings on Friday afternoons. The performance on the 20th will feature new music performances by members of the cast and the ensemble (possibly featuring music by one or two of the composers), as well as an exhibition of some of the production materials that have gone into making this unique project. All events will take place at the gallery in Ealing, and all the information can be found (or will be found) on Opera Viscera’s website. More information can of course be sought by using my Contact page, or by emailing our Director Lia Alba.

Canadian contemporary music ensemble Ansae will premiere my piece ‘Broken Études for Consort in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario on Tuesday. Ansae asked composers to write new pieces for their unusual ensemble of flute, oboe, saxophone, melodica and piano, and my contribution is a liberal expansion of my earlier Two Études for Solo Violin. Closer to home, Jack Adler-McKean will give the premiere of La Belle Captive at his recital at the RNCM on the Thursday of that week – it’s sounding great in rehearsals!

In other news, the Hebrides Ensemble workshopped my Piano Quartet ‘Frusta’ at the York Spring Festival of New Music on the 14th of May, and also selected the piece to be played in their evening concert. The ensemble featured David Alberman (violin), Catherine Marwood (viola), William Conway (cello) and Philip Moore (piano).

It’s the York Spring Festival of New Music in a couple of weeks, and as part of the York New Music Exchange weekend the Hebrides Ensemble will be workshopping some pieces including my Piano Quartet ‘Frusta’.

The Hebrides Ensemble is Scotland’s finest purveyor of contemporary chamber music, recording and touring regularly and getting shortlisted for a PRS Prize in the process. They will do a workshop of my piece as well as compositions by Durham University’s Ian Mitchell, Birmingham Conservatoire’s Carolina Noguera and Edinburgh’s Ryan Somerville at 11.00 in York’s Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall on the 14th May. One of these will then be performed in their concert that evening, alongside works by Peter Maxwell Davies, György Kurtág and Judith Weir.

On the 17th June tuba player Jack Adler-McKean will perform a new piece of mine, La Belle Captive at his Gold Medal Recital at the RNCM. The Gold Medal recitals see 12 of the RNCM’s top performers compete for the Gold Medal award. The piece:

Taking its name from a painting by René Magritte, ‘La Belle Captive’ sees the tuba and piano create a directionless wash of harmonic and melodic material. The music seems to float serenely through a barren landscape until violent interjections begin to appear, first in the tuba then lagging behind in the piano. Rather than enacting a dialectic, the serenity and violence seem to coexist on different planes without interaction, drifting unpeturbed past one another at various points in the music. A similar relationship exists between the tuba and the piano – sometimes they are playing similar material, sometimes highly differentiated material, but any interaction seems almost co-incidental.

Jack will be playing the piece, scored for tuba and 4-hands piano, alongside new pieces by Robin Stevens and Simon Parkin, as well as repertoire pieces by William Kraft, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen. See details of the recital, happening at 9.30pm, here. Jack will also be playing a similar programme including my piece earlier, at his final year RNCM recital on the 2nd June.

Violinist Conway Kuo (pictured) is to play my Étude in Glissandi at a concert in New York on the 15 May, part of the Vox Novus Fifteen Minutes of Fame concert series. Conway, the Associate Principal Second Violin of the New York City Ballet Orchestra and a First Violinist with the New York City Opera Orchestra, will perform 15 solo violin works consecutively, all under 60 seconds in length. You can read more about Conway, the concert and the other composers here.

Incidentally, if you want to listen to some of my music (and can’t get yourself to New York for 60 seconds of it), I’ve set up a new Audio page. This page hosts six recordings at a time so you can get straight to what I most want you to hear (and avoid wading through the rest)…a kind of ‘greatest hits’ compilation if you like. Of course, if you fancy hearing other things, recordings of many other pieces are still available at the Works List. To celebrate, here’s a brand new recording of Agape Aria, played by Manchester University’s Vaganza and York University’s Chimera Ensemble last month:

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I have been selected to participate in The Opera Group‘s ‘Emerging Composers and Writers Mentoring Project’. The two-day session will see 15 composers and 15 writers develop ideas and skills relating to the writing of opera, at Guildhall School of Music and Drama on the 9th and 10th of April.

Glyndebourne Opera composer-in-residence Julian Philips (pictured) will lead the Masterclass for composers, while Simon Christmas will explain the mysterious art of libretto writing to young writers. Following the event, a composer-writer duo will be commissioned to write a mini-opera for The Opera Group on a similar theme to their forthcoming production of Luke Bedford‘s new opera ‘Seven Angels‘.

The Opera Group, if you’ll excuse me quoting their website, is an award-winning, nationally and internationally renowned opera company, specialising in commissioning and producing new operas, whose aim is to merge the best of contemporary theatre and music. What a lovely thing, then, to go and get some of their expertise…

This Tuesday sees the premiere of a new piece of mine, Ludovico’s Harp. The piece is written for performance at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation, in response to the author’s novel A Clockwork Orange, in the 50th anniversary of its completion.

The piece is rather unusually scored for 6 male voices with 12 tremolo harmonicas (they’re equipped with two each). Here’s the programme note:

‘I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I’d viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised garbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog himself’

The viewpoint that Alex laughs off in this passage from Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange seems to come straight out of the tradition of F. R. Leavis and his mid-century literary periodical Scrutiny. The idea of art and literature as ‘universal’, morally elevating pursuits – so devastatingly disproved by concentration camp guards reading Goethe and listening to Beethoven – is heavily satirised in Burgess’ novel.

The disparity between Alex’s callous, ruthlessly amoral actions and the humanist call-to-arms of the Ninth Symphony of his beloved Beethoven is a key theme in the novel, and provides the conceptual material for ‘Ludovico’s Harp’. Here, Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is translated into Clockwork-Orange speak – made more violent, more sinister and more hollow, seizing on Alex’s favourite term of approval, ‘horrorshow’. The harmonicas, a favourite instrument of Burgess’, gradually oppress and submerge the voices and their lauding of brotherhood. ‘Ludovico’s Harp’ is about that most sinister phenomenon of a noble ideal being used for sinister ends – Alex was certainly not the first in the 20th century to pervert Beethoven in this way

The performance will feature members of Ad Solem (Manchester University’s chamber choir), and the 12 harmonicas have been generously loaned to me by composer Christian Mason, whose ‘In Time Entwined, In Space Enlaced‘ featured a colossal 36 of them.

The evening will also feature four other responses to Anthony Burgess’ work – Hannah Taylor’s ‘Rasoodock’, Jasmin Rodgman‘s ‘Orang Squash‘, and electro-acoustic music by Ignacio Rodriguez & Michael Lau.