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...
My new String Quartet is being premiered by the Arditti Quartet this Tuesday 29 May, in a special concert at London's newly reopened Purcell Room in memory of Leo Hepner. Written in five movements, it features unusual tunings for half the instruments – the 2nd violin has all its strings tuned down a semitone, the viola has its strings tuned down a tone. Leo...
My piece Codex (Homage to Serafini), premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2013, will receive a performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London's Cadogan Hall in June 2019, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru. The performance is supported by the PRS for Music Foundation's Resonate scheme, which supports repeat performances of British orchestral works. The piece was inspired by Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, a beautiful and...
I've just spent four lovely days at Snape Maltings with a fantastic team of singers and players, rehearsing and showing around half an hour of the (as yet untitled) opera that playwright Alice Birch and I have been working on with the help of a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship. The cast (soprano Anna Dennis, baritone Felix Kemp, mezzo soprano Lucy Goddard and tenor Nathan Vale)...
An update on the opera that playwright Alice Birch and I have been working on with the help of a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship from Snape Maltings: We're spending some time in Snape in April rehearsing around 25 minutes of music from the (as yet untitled opera), with a fantastic team of singers (soprano Anna Dennis, baritone Alexander Robin Baker, mezzo soprano Lucy Goddard and tenor...