Winter Roundup

It’s been a busy dive into winter and a time to look back at the last few weeks of intense activity. I have just returned from 2 weeks in Australia where I was working on two projects. It was great to be in Australia, where I was born and grew up (until moving to London aged 18). It always feels like there is a deep connection to the country when I make work in Australia and there are all sorts of complexities around identity and departure whenever I am presenting my work there or composing new works for Australian artists.

The first of the two projects I was in Australia for, was the Australian premiere of my work Custodians of the Sky. This work for tenor and baritone, chamber orchestra, electronics and video, premiered in Paris with Le Balcon in 2023 to sell out crowds, and it was brilliant to bring it to Australia. The work is all about the night sky and uses text and poetry by all living Australian writers. So it is a work that is deeply rooted in an Australian perspective, whilst also being about something universal which we can all relate to.

Custodians of the Sky was brilliantly performed in Sydney by Michael Smallwood (tenor) Adrian Tambourini (baritone) members of Ensemble Offspring and conducted by Alphonse Cemin who was the conductor from Le Balcon for the premiere. In fact having both Alphonse and Michael from the premiere performance in Sydney gave the work a security that I have not experienced very often, as mostly when my works have been repeated it has been with an entirely new group of musicians. Because of Alphonse and Michael being part of this production I felt we were able to immediately go deeper into the musicality of the piece, rather than the mechanics of getting it together and this lead to some revelations in the work that I had not remembered and has spurred me on in my compositional thinking. So a really valuable experience for me as a composer, as well as hopefully for the audience and performers.

The other project I was in Australia for took me down to Canberra and was a genuine honor for me as a composer. It was a portrait concert at the National Library of Australia (NLA), a Living Collection event which involved performances of a number of my works and an in conversation element where I spoke about my career and the works being performed. This came about as the NLA hold an archive of my works, from my earliest compositions through to about 2020. I will give the NLA more works around 2040 and when I die the NLA will complete it’s Luke Styles Archive. For now though, the idea of the Living Collection is to bring this archive to life with performances and conversation which will encourage people to engage further with the archive through research.

The works of mine that were performed covered 10yrs of my career. There were works for young people that I composed for the Aldeburgh Festival (All Howl at Once), chamber music for strings from 2009 and 2019 and a large vocal work (Vanity) which I wrote whilst in residence at Glyndebourne. These works allowed the audience to hear my vocal music, which has been central to my career, as well as the importance that chamber music plays in developing my harmonic and rhythmic thought, and the development (and maybe consistency in some regards) of my compositional style over the decade that these works spanned.

I have lots of people to thank for this event, all of whom are credited in the link below, but most importantly Tobias Cole who was the central musician I collaborated with to bring these works to performance. The full event is on YouTube for people to enjoy.

For me now it’s head down composing the final parts of a new dance work for Pilobolus in the USA and a new song cycle for Baritone and Piano.