London Symphony Orchestra premiere

The next few months are going to be big for me. They will see a host of performances including the first piece of mine to be played by the London Symphony Orchestra, the progress of an opera I started back in 2016 that suffered some real covid-19 derailment and the delivery of my 3rd Deal Festival as Artistic Director.

So the really big one is the UK premiere of my symphonic song cycle, No Friend But The Mountains, by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on the 19th of June. This is a composer’s dream. The LSO are one of those orchestras I first started listening to before I even knew what an orchestra was and then as I got hooked on classical music they were the go to orchestra when looking for recordings to buy. This is a work very close to my heart and the first large scale symphonic work of mine with voices outside of opera. Since it’s WP in 2022 I’ve gone on to compose two more cycles in this vein (Voices of Power and Custodians of the Sky). I’m looking forward to seeing lots of friendly faces at the performance, but I’ll probably just be frozen in a mixture of delight and amazement.

Before the LSO gig though, there are three gigs of my music that are all completely different and in various parts of the UK. The first is my silent film score Entr’acte which will be performed at the Newbury Spring Festival. It is the second outing of this new version of my score by Counterpoise and the ensemble is top rate giving a thrilling and energetic performance to accompany this absurdist classic silent film from the 1920s. I’m pleased that there will be a third performance at the Deal Festival in July.

I then head to Folkestone for an event with Folkestone New Music, an organisation that has made big waves in the UK contemporary music scene over the last few years. I’ll be joined by bassist Marianne Schofield and fellow composer John Woolrich to discuss my music for double bass and to hear a selection of my double bass solo works.

Then it’s back to London for the Wigmore Hall, where my arrangement of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 will receive it’s London premiere by Chamber Domaine, after their featured performance at last year’s Deal Festival. The collaboration and legacy of performances and projects such as this, through the Deal Festival, to reach multiple audiences is something core to my approach as an Artistic Director and I’m thrilled Tom Kemp at Chamber Domaine shares this ethos.

Come the first two weeks of July it’s the Deal Festival and I’ll be in full AD mode, engaging with audiences and welcoming performers for a huge array of musical events across all genres as well as all the other artforms. There will be events for young people and families and as ever a big focus on the community making the festival central to the town itself. I’m pleased to also be able to bring international artists to Deal, including performers from Lithuania, the Czech Republic and France. Quartet Page Blanche are this years French musicians and they bring with them a programme, including a work of mine, Esprit Submergé, which premiered last October at the Page Blanche Festival in the south of France. I’m pleased that this gig will also have a London outing at the Institut Francais on the 8th of July.