News

The programme for the Aldeburgh Festival 2020 has been announced, and several of my works will be performed: Firstly, Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, will perform my string orchestra piece My Curves are not Mad in the festival's opening concert in Bury St Edmund's St Edmundsbury Cathedral. They commissioned the piece and toured it in 2015. My opera Violet, written...

Violinist Fenella Humphreys is including my Études I-IV in her 'Caprices' project, to be performed at various concerts around the UK in the coming months, and recorded for a new CD. Fenella is running a crowdfunding campaign for the recording of this album, with many rewards on offer. Find out more and donate by clicking here. She will also be playing newly commissioned pieces by Laurence...

Adam Swayne of the Riot Ensemble will give the world premiere of my new set of piano pieces, Inventions (for Heath Robinson), on 2 August. The pieces will be performed at Riot's gig at the Petworth Festival in Sussex, alongside a new ensemble piece by Terence Allbright and works by Ann Cleare, Gabriella Smith, Cassandra Miller, Paul Burnell and Klaus Huber. In advance of the concert, I...

A brief roundup of some recent performances: The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, performed my Codex (Homage to Serafini) at London's Cadogan Hall last month. The performance is supported by the PRS for Music Foundation's Resonate scheme, which supports repeat performances of British orchestral works – the BBC Symphony Orchestra did it in 2013. A couple of weeks before, the SOL Quartet gave a recital in Water Into Beer, literally...

As part of my post as Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge, I've curated a pair of concerts at the college in early 2019, featuring music by me alongside other interesting pieces… Firstly, the Fidelio Trio will perform on 6 February, and will perform my Piano Trio "The Chronophage", alongside Piano Trio Two by Judith Weir (a...

You can now buy the scores of my Études for solo violin (2010/2014) from the Faber Music Store. As always, I'm grateful to the peerless editorial team at Faber Music. The first two of the Études were written for Sarah Hill and first performed by her in Manchester in 2010, while numbers 3 & 4 were commissioned by the London Sinfonietta for Jonathan Morton in 2014. Daniel...

My first opera (title to be announced!), written with playwright Alice Birch, will be performed across the UK in summer and autumn 2020 – at the Aldeburgh Festival and at a number of venues on tour. It is a co-commission for Music Theatre Wales and Aldeburgh Festival. The story concerns the inhabitants of a village which begins losing hours from its day – one night,...

The talented young players of the Britten Sinfonia Academy are performing my new set of orchestrations of Robert Schumann's Studies in Canonic Form Op. 56, on the 12th, 13th and 14th July. I'm delighted that they're being performed alongside two of my desert island pieces – Webern's arrangement of Bach's Ricercar a 6, and Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. All of the music in the concert, then, involves orchestrations...

The Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, gave the Dutch premiere of Sonnet Machine in a concert at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw on Saturday as part of the Holland Festival. You can now hear the broadcast on NPO Radio 4, alongside music by George Benjamin (Sometime Voices, Dance Figures and his arrangement of Bach's Canon & Fugue from the Art of Fugue), and Edward Nesbit...