The ensemble was founded three years ago and is currently headed by Aaron Holloway-Nahum. Their mission is “to present contemporary classical music in illuminating, engaging, and rewarding contexts for audiences and listeners”. “This means everything from cross-arts collaboration in concerts (such as performing music with an artist painting in response to the music live on stage) to preparing video pieces for an upcoming website”, explains Holloway-Nahum. At this time, the ensemble exists of different performers and composers, including  pianists Claudia Maria Racovicean & Adam Swayne, flautist Kate Walter and composer Raymond Yiu.

At St Luke’s, The Riot Ensemble will perform Song Offerings by Jonathan Harvey and new work of Holloway-Nahum called Plainer Sailing, written specifically for this concert. ”The piece sets the words of a beautiful poem by Sasha Dugdale, whom I met last year. For me, the revealing text of Plainer Sailing is the central quatrain that unleashes a central question of life:”

She too surveyed the calm, and was concerned:
What to make of all the signs, for the sea is rarely blank.
And there was a circling, a moment returned
When daughter was mother, and there the sun shrunk

“I think just about any composer would agree that these words are incredibly beautiful and call out for music, but some composers might really, really hate the idea that a piece of music could be ‘asking’ something, or have some sort of external meaning.  But I stand with Harvey when he says that music “is never value free”.

Aaron Holloway-Nahum at St Luke’s

Aaron Holloway-Nahum’s most memorable memory goes back to the recording of his CD in Abbey Road Studios. “Peter Gregson came in and recorded my solo cello work, and we also recorded some chamber orchestra and orchestral pieces (including a percussion concerto with some 70+ players).  Conducting those groups and sitting in the control room of that studio, with all its history in all genres of music, was truly inspiring and is something I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”

These days, Holloway-Nahum has his hands quite full. He just submitted his doctorate and he’s finishing some pieces he wrote for LSO musicians. Furthermore, he’ll be performing at some festivals this summer, including the  highSCORE Festival in Pavia, Italy.

The concert of The Riot Ensemble takes place on 17 June at St. Luke’s (map). It starts at 8pm and is followed by a wine reception where you can  have a chat with the musicians. For tickets and more information, have a look at the LSO website.

Full interview with Aaron Holloway-Nahum (pdf)

PYCS has been a wonderful experience, as well as having my first orchestral piece played by the London Symphony Orchestra, the best thing for me was to meet the five wonderful fellow composers – Andrew McCormack, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Joshua Penduck, Matthew Sergeant and Sasha Siem; each one of them with has an individual voice, and I would be delighted to share platform with all of them sometime in the future.

Out of the six of us, Andrew received a commission to write a 10-minute piece for the LSO, which is to be premiered later on this year. And I have the honour to receive a commission to write a piece for the Chinese pianist Lang Lang and the London based Silk String Quartet. It is a piano quintet with a difference as the four members of the quartet play not violin, viola or any familiar Western instruments; instead, the quartet is made up of four Chinese string instruments – erhu (二胡), pipa (琵琶), yangqin (揚琴) and guzheng (古箏). An interesting combination, and a challenging piece to write. I hope the end result, Maomao Yü, is going to turn out alright.

I recalled attending a lunchtime chamber music concert at Imperial College when I was a student there which featured three 20th century string quartets – Britten’s 3rd, one of Shostakovich’s and Maconchy’s 4th. I did not care much about the Shostakovich’s (at least at the time), and thought the Britten’s was rather mild compared to the Maconchy’s. It was the first time I heard Maconchy’s music and I had not ceased to be amazed by her music ever since. I managed to get hold of the scores of some of the string quartets – 13 in all, and the recordings of the complete set is still available on CD. I have just spent a few days listening to pieces by her which are unknown to me. As a result, I am even more puzzled than before by the neglect her music has received. Maybe it is time to make changes.

I also discovered that one of my older pieces, Calendar of Tolerable Inventions from Around the World for wind quintet, is going to be broardcast on BBC Radio 3 this Saturday. If you are interested, tune in.

Butterworth’s spirit hovers over the Celebrating English Song series at St Bartholomew’s Church, Tardebigge, even if his actual songs are performed there only relatively rarely. The leafy rural setting, the sense of an English tradition, and the silent presence of AE Housman (born only a few miles away in Bromsgrove); it’s absolutely what Butterworth was about. His lovely settings of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, sung by tenor Nicholas Mulroy, form the tender heart of this recital.

Iestyn Morris

The rest of the concert shows the very different paths English song took in Butterworth’s absence, with two of Britten’s Canticles (featuring Anneke Scott on horn) and Judith Weir’s haunting Scotch Minstrelsy.

The world premiere of Faerie Tales by Hong Kong-born composer Raymond Yiu is a highlight. Setting World War I poems of loss by Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle and Wilfred Owen, and written for counter-tenor Iestyn Morris as well as Mulroy and pianist Marc Verter, it sounds like a wonderfully suitable pairing for the Butterworth.

This may be a melancholy recital, but its message is inspiring.

Sun Aug 31, St Bartholomew’s Church, Church Lane, Tardebigge. Talk 2pm, concert 3pm, £12.50. Tel: 01527 872422. http://www.celebratingenglishsong.co.uk

The idea of Faerie Tales, scored for counter-tenor, tenor and piano, came to me when I discovered one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s lesser known writings. Deaths in the family as a result of the First World War, most notably those of his son Kingsley and his brother Innes, drove Arthur Conan Doyle into depression. He found solace in spiritualism – although his interest in it went as far back as the 1880s – and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave. The Coming of the Fairies (1922), his book-length account of the Cottingley fairy pictures, is one such efforts.

No actual text from the book is used in the song cycle; instead, one of Conan Doyle’s late poems titled Fate (in parts describing things heard and seen during a séance) is interwoven with poems/writings by Wilfred Owen, Rudyard and John Kipling, Shakespeare, John Keats and J. M. Barrie to conceive a meditation on grief and make-believe.

At first glance, this collection of writers might seem a bit odd. But after reading the last letter John Kipling wrote to his father before he was killed (or believed to be, as his body was never found) in action at the battle of Loos in September 1915 and Rudyard Kipling’s grief-drenched poems written after this event, most noticeably My Boy Jack and Epitaphs of the War. I felt the dynamic between the Kiplings was not dissimilar to the Conan Doyles, and in turn, something I can relate to.

As for the Owen, I chose his The Parable of the Young Man and the Old for two reasons – one, his death and Kingsley Conan Doyle are less than a month apart, two, since the premiere of Faerie Tales is paired with Britten’s splendid Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac, which serves as the prototype to his setting of the same Owen poem in the War Requiem. Intimidating it may be, but I saw no better choice of text.

And Shakespeare, John Keats and J. M. Barrie? Well, a song cycle titled Faerie Tales with no mention of fairies can easily be considered as mis-selling, don’t you agree?

There is a good article in the Daily Telegraph. You can also have a sneak preview on The Guardian website too.

Svensson formed the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, as known as E.S.T. in 1990 with double bassist Dan Berglund and drummer Magnus Öström. Besides their technical brilliance and lyricism (particularly in Svensson’s playing), their subtle use of electronics and distortion add a grainier layer to the musical fabric which I find mesmerising and very beautiful.

For those of you who have never heard of E.S.T., listen to Strange Place for Snow (2002) – that is where I started, and it is spellbinding.

Rather than getting acquainted with the name of André Previn by way of his work as a conductor or Morecambe and Wise, I first came across his name in some of his early recordings as a jazz pianist for the Contemporary label in the last 1950s – My Fair Lady (1957), Pal Joey (1957), Gigi (1958), and the three extraordinary solo albums he made between 1958 and 1959, each one of them dedicated to the songs of a single composer (or songwriter, if you wish).

André Previn Plays Songs by Vernon Duke (1958), the first of the trilogy, is the most fascinating on two levels: firstly, the choice of composer, and secondly, the playing itself.

Vernon Duke (born Vladimir Dukelsky) is now remembered as the composer of popular songs – Autumn in New York, April in Paris, I Can’t Get Started, or Taking a Chance on Love – well known jazz standards of supreme intricacy, and yet, the number of people who can name the composer of these songs are few. Duke must be turning in his grave in a tumble-dryer fashion to learn that his serious concert œuvres, once championed by Diaghilev, Gershwin, Koussevitzky and Prokofiev, hardly see the light of day nowadays. His Zéphyr et Flore and Epitaphe are available on the Chandos label, giving a glimpse of the works of yet another underrated composer.

There is a list of jazz pianists whose names keep coming up in conversations on iconic jazz playing – Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. Somehow, André Previn never quite makes it on to this list, and unfairly so. Listening to André Previn Plays Songs by Vernon Duke for the first time was a real ear-opener for me; perfect balance of technical sophistication and musicality; at times the playing got so complicated rhythmically one would wonder if there were two persons playing four-handed. I always had this funny image of Previn transforming into Vishnu at the piano when I listened to his early jazz recordings. His jazz playing got much mellower in his later recordings – After Hours (1989) and Uptown (1990) for example. To me, they are similarly loveable. But it is the electricity in these early solo recordings (which also include André Previn Plays Songs by Jerome Kern (1959) and André Previn Plays Songs by Harold Arlen (1960)) that is vividly etched into my memory. It is the same electricity that powers the extraordinary recording of Walton’s symphony.

I have lost count of the former situation; as for the latter, hearing Richard Baker‘s Learning to Fly (1999) for basset clarinet and ensemble at the (now discontinued) State of the Nation weekend in 1999 at the South Bank was definitely one. Since then, when I got carried away by writing too many notes, I would look at what Richard did, came back, sat up, went over my drafts and crossed out all the fluffy bits, or sometimes just simply started again.

Aaron Copland once said he composed by subtraction, which in turn reminded me of what Antoine de Saint Exupéry said about perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. Every time when I think about Baker’s works, I could not stop but thinking about Copland and Saint Exupéry.

Baker’s music is unpredictable, carefully crafted, and most important of all, profound without being pretentious. Every time I hear his music I am amazed by the economy of mean and yet the immense emotional power the music carries – Huiusmodi sunt omnia (2003) and Angelus (2004) are the prime examples of his ‘less-is-more’ aesthetic tactic – something too easily labelled but very hard to achieve.

His collaboration with the poet Lavinia Greenlaw has resulted in two striking vocal works to date – Slow passage, low prospect (2004) for the baritone Christopher Purves and Written on a train (2006) for the mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn. Judging from the quality of these pieces, I think an opera from him is something worth waiting for.

Besides his career as a composer, Richard Baker is also a fine conductor – his performances of music by Gerald Barry have been universally praised for their precision and musicality; if you know Barry’s music, you would understand the implication …

To me, there are a handful of pieces which employ electronics with conviction; in fact, they are rather striking: George Benjamin’s Antara, Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti, Boulez’s Anthèmes 2 and Julian Anderson’s The Book of Hours.

This list had expanded last Saturday when I heard Philippe Leroux‘s Voi(rex) for female voice, six instruments and live electronics as part of Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series. It is a serious, humorous, unpredictable and totally indescribable piece of music. The final minutes of the piece contain some of the most surreal and magical moments I have experienced in the concert hall for a long time. There is a recording, but I think it is best to see/hear it live. So look out for it.

The music of Lukas Foss is rarely heard in the United Kingdom. Even in his ‘native’ America (he was born in Berlin and moved to the States in 1937), not many of his pieces are played on a regular basis, with the exceptions of the early Three American Pieces (1944) and Capriccio (1946). These are nice pieces, and certainly deserved to be played. But his best works – the glorious, Coplandesque secular cantata The Prairie (1938); the achingly lyrical second solo biblical cantatas Song of Songs (1946); the spiky and yet sumptuous Time Cycle (1960); the riotously imaginative Baroque Variations (1968); the complex, semi-aleatoric Echoi (1963), Cello Concert (1966) and Non-Improvisation (1967); the dramatic and ironic American Cantata (1975); the strange, out-of-this-worldly Elytres (1964), The Fragments of Archilochos (1965), Geod (1969) and Quintets for Orchestra (1979); the minimalistic Solo (1981) and Solo Observed (1982); the poetic Three Airs for Frank O’Hara’s Angel  (1972) and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1978), the playful Tashi (1986); an outstanding quartet of concerti writing in 1980s and 1990s – Renaissance Concerto (1986), Clarinet Concerto (1988), American Landscapes (1989) and Concerto for the Left Hand (1995) – are seldom played.

I always thought composing was not something that can be taught; and when I approached Lukas Foss for lessons, he confirmed that. I have learnt so much more about composing by studying his scores, listening to his music, reading/listening to him talking about inspirations (and sometimes the techniques too). When I asked him about what he considered to be a musical idea, his reply was simply ‘an idea is a surprise that makes sense’. This saying alone has served me well as a composer in the past ten years.

Like all composers who have an equal standing in conducting (Adès, Benjamin, Bernstein, Boulez,  Maderna, Knussen and Schuller to name a few), Foss’s choices of pieces were often unusual and never short of surprises. I studied his programming strategy closely and often found new, interesting connections – may that be historical, intellectual, musical – between these pieces, and often, with non-musical subjects as well.

Prommers had the chance to hear his Time Cycle in 2000 performed by Rosemary Hardy, London Sinfonietta and Oliver Knussen; it remained the only high profile outing of his music in recent years in the UK, and the one and only time his music featured at the Proms, although he was invited to contribute a variation to the Bright Cecilia: Variations on a Theme by Purcell for the Last Night of the Proms 2002; in the end, he did not write it. He told me he simply cannot do it. No work had come from his pen works since For Aaron (2002), and I hate to think Lukas had stopped writing.

I suspect the unpopularity of Lukas Foss’s music lies in the fact that he is a composer whose music is difficult to pigeon-hole, as eclecticism is often frown upon in serious concert music. But if you, as I quote the title of George Michael’s 1990 album, listen without prejudice, I hope you will find the bewildering depth and wealth of imagination in this kind, inspiring musician fascinating as I do.

If you have not heard his recordings of Bach’s keyboard concerti or Mozart’s chamber music, go and get them. They are truly amazing.

p.s. If anyone is interested in hearing any of Foss’s pieces, please leave a comment, or drop me a line; I will be more than happy to share them with you.

After my return, I tried to track down Hammershøi’s paintings in London Galleries, only to discover that they are not currently on display – and there are not that many of them. Edward Hopper has always been one of my favourite painters – that indescribable sense of isolation and solitude is something I always find haunting. You look at some of Hopper’s late paintings – Sunlight in an Empty Room (1963) for example – your mind would wonder what goes on outside the picture, the things that are felt but not seen. I get the same feeling when I listen to Sciarrino’s music; I have heard Omaggio A Burri (1995) and Esplorazione del Bianco II (1986) in concert, and they were possibly the most intense listening experiences I have ever had – very unsettling.

Why is Hammershøi’s art so neglected outside Denmark – just as the way Nielsen’s music once was? I know Michael Palin made a documentary called The Mystery of Hammershøi in 2005 for the BBC, which I have not seen. I wonder how much it helped to make non-Danish speakers aware of this marvellous painter.

On a brighter note, most of Dreyer’s movies are now available on DVD; my copies of Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964) have just arrived. Something for the bank holiday weekend when I get a bit stuck with the composing.
 

It has not been my favourite piece of Mahler – I appreciate the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth Symphony or Das Lied von der Erde more. But last night performance changed my point of view to the piece – not totally, but it certainly helped me to understand and appreciate the piece better.

First and foremost, there was so much more violence in this piece than I previously realised; at time, it was as frightening as the Sixth. But that was not all – violence and anger alone cannot conquer the world alone, if at all. Gergiev’s decision to play the three middle movements attacca was more than a touch of genius, and it really showed his understanding of the theatricality of the music: just as the ländler of the second movement coming to an end, the tranquility was interrupted by the short, aggressive timpani strokes. It hit you like the news of the suicide of your best friend for twenty-three years – shocking and merciless. Life would never be the same again – even the transcendental luminosity of the primal light could not turn back time. But that is just life.

It was interesting to note that Gergiev placed the first violins, cellos and double basses on his left, and the second violins and violas on his right – it made an arresting listening experience. Never have I heard In ruhig fliessender Bewegung sounding so kaleidoscopic and manic. If that was not spellbounding, I am not sure what is.

I look forward to his Rachmaninoff symphonies this autumn.

Since then, as my youthful arrogance and ignorance were wearing off, I came to understand and appreciate Birtwistle’s music more and more. In 2003, when I was a spnm shortlisted composer, Birtwistle (or so I was told) chose my wind quintet to be included in a concert at the Huddersfield Festival of which his Refrains and Choruses was to be the focus. In a pre-concert talk, I was asked by the host about my ‘secret’ of making the alto flute heard amid the busy texture in a particular movement. As I was rambling away nervously, clever words swirling in my heads and trying to sound sophisticated and clever, Sir Harry suddenly broke me off and said: ‘Raymond, you are allowed to leave some dirt in your music!’. I was lost for words. I was lost for words because of a moment of revelation – it is not cleverness that gives a piece of music its heart and soul; it is the earthiness and rawness that matter. There are things beyond analysis. In that sense, the music of Birtwistle and Janáček have a lot in common.

I went to the general rehearsal of The Minotaur at Covent Garden last Saturday. It really blew me away. It is a long way away from the Birtwistle of Punch and Judy or The Mask of Orpheus. In fact, I found Birtwistle’s music has been becoming more and more lyrical since The Second Mrs Kong. The opening of the new opera really reminded me of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Once again, as in The Second Mrs Kong, the cimbalom plays an important part in the orchestra, alongside Ariadne’s obbligato saxophone. In the entire duration of the opera, sonic wonders never ceased (and I can’t wait to see the full score). The last scene of the opera was doubtless the most moving moment in Birtwistle’s entire output.

First night is tonight. Go see it if you can. At the end of the day, who’s afraid of Birtwistle?

My first meeting with Colin Matthews happened three days ago. Other than getting some interesting tips on ‘What and What Not’, we had some interesting discussion on music by other composers – some dead, some alive – and it transpired to be a very helpful exercise. We both agreed Nielsen’s Sixth Symphony is an underrated masterpiece; I would go as far as saying all Nielsen’s symphonies are underrated masterpieces, as well as his three concerti, two operas, and other orchestral pieces. Nielsen and Sibelius should be on equal ground. How long will we have to wait to hear the next Nielsen Symphony Cycle in London? Well, at least something is happening across the Atlantic, according to Alex Ross.

The title of the my piece, Xocolatl, came to me when I was re-reading Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney. On the day I went to see Colin, I found the perfect little preface to the score:

In that November off Tehuantepec
Night stilled the slopping of the sea.
The day came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck,

Good clown … One thought of Chinese chocolate
And large umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.
What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers – cloudy-conjuring sea?
C’était mon esprit bâtard, l’ignominie.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds, Wallace Stevens

There will be no Holloway; instead, just a little help from Mozart.