Scottish Premiere and new work for Jane Sheldon
Since I last checked in I have been busy traveling in Scotland and Cornwall. Taking in the UK premiere of my oboe concerto Neon Highway and spending 4 days on a residency in Cornwall with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
The performance of Neon Highway with soloist Nicholas Daniel and Red Note Ensemble as part of the Sound Festival was fantastic. This was the second performance of the concerto and it really found its feet as the tempi settled into a strong forward moving motion and at times a Spanish dance like groove permeated the whole orchestra. It was great to hear the piece twice in such close succession and it allowed me to find those couple of moments that needed tweaking and then also absorb the work, beyond the nerves of the first performance, to be able to hear how the work might suggest future directions in my work.
We enjoyed fantastic high voltage playing from both the smooth, soaring soloist Nicholas Daniel and the ensemble. In the opening movement, incisive rhythmic playing was paramount. It was, I thought, a marvelously clean and clear work.
What composing Neon Highway has really done is confirm that I want to write more concerti. The way the solo voice inhabites its own musical space drawing the listener to possible narrative or dialogue potentialities in the music are facets of the concerto as a “genre” that I am very enthused about tackling again and again. Thankfully there are a couple of opportunities that have presented themselves along these lines, in the form of a new Saxophone Concerto and a new Double Bass Concerto. It’s far too early to reveal details but both pieces will be performed in Europe, Australia and North America by 2022.
The next stop for Neon Highway will be in Spain/Seville in January 2020, with soloist Sarah Roper and ensemble Taller Sonoro as part of the festival: Encuentros Sonoros. I will also be in coversation about my work as part of the festival so will be brushing up my Spanish over the next few weeks.
Following the Sound Festival in Aberdeen I jumped on a train all the way down to the other end of the UK to spend four days with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and writer Hazel Gould to start developing a new work. Without giving the game away, the work will be immersed in the tin mining traditions and Cornish mythology and will premiere in 2021. Hazel and I are working closely on the content of the new work and I plan to be composing this new one hour piece throughout 2020. I can’t wait to really get stuck in. The landscapes, the people and the stories of that part of the world are incredibly rich and brimming with musical impulses.
Back in my studio I have been finishing off a new work for soprano Jane Sheldon and Gondwana Choirs. The work will be the start (1st movement) of a vocal concerto utilising a range of extended vocal techniques and traditional singing, exploring themes around astronomy in different cultures and story-telling of the stars.
The Gondwana choristers taking part will have two weeks working with Jane and I on the piece. We will experiment with different vocal sounds and singing to help shape the work and develop its sound world, especially as this work sees me playing with seriously extended vocal techniques and open form structural ideas which I have not used in awhile in my music.
The start of this new work and the results of the collaboration with Gondwana and Jane will be performed at a concert in Sydney in January.
Over the festive period I will be doing a lot of reading as I collate the text for a major symphonic song cycle, which will be my prime compositional focus for the first 6 months of 2020.