George Lewis - The Will to Adorn Julian Anderson - Book of Hours

Clement Power – conductor– Members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and performers from the Foyle Future Firsts Development Programme

Plus world premieres of Eugene Birman - Manifesto Aleksandr Brusentsev - Our Own Light Arne Gieshoff - UmschreibungEdmund Hunt - Argatnél

The Will to AdornMonday 9 June 20147.30pmQueen Elizabeth Hall

Programme £2

2

Welcome

Debut Sounds is a celebration of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s young talent programmes: Leverhulme Young Composers and Foyle Future Firsts. Over the past year, members of both programmes have been supported by the Orchestra and its Education & Community Department to explore new ideas, learn new skills and work closely with the Orchestra’s musicians. Tonight gives us the opportunity to hear the culmination of this work by some of the most exciting young musicians in classical music.

Our young composers – Eugene Birman, Aleksandr Brusentsev, Arne Gieshoff and Edmund Hunt – have worked with an ensemble comprising members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Foyle Future Firsts Programme throughout the academic year. In a series of workshops dedicated to trying out their compositional ideas, the four composers have received advice and support from Composer in Residence Julian Anderson and conductor Clement Power.

Tonight marks the end of Julian Anderson’s tenure as LPO Composer in Residence and Young Composers mentor. The LPO would like to thank Julian for his unceasing dedication to the programme, and the sensitive and insightful guidance he has given to every participating young composer over the years.

Visit www.lpo.org.uk/debutsounds to find out more about tonight’s four young composers and their work.

Leverhulme Young Composers is supported by an Arts Portfolio Grant from the Leverhulme Trust with additional support from The Hinrichsen Foundation. Foyle Future Firsts is generously supported by The Foyle Foundation with additional support from Angus Allnatt Charitable Foundation, The Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust, Help Musicians UK and The Tillett Trust.

Welcome to Southbank Centre

We hope you enjoy your visit. We have a Duty Manager available at all times. If you have any queries please ask any member of staff for assistance.

Eating, drinking and shopping? Southbank Centre shops and restaurants include Foyles, EAT, Giraffe, Strada, YO! Sushi, wagamama, Le Pain Quotidien, Las Iguanas, ping pong, Canteen, Caffè Vergnano 1882, Skylon, Concrete, Feng Sushi and Topolski, as well as cafes, restaurants and shops inside Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery.

If you wish to get in touch with us following your visit please contact the Visitor Experience Team at Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, phone 020 7960 4250, or email customer@southbankcentre.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

A few points to note for your comfort and enjoyment: PHOTOGRAPHY is not allowed in the auditorium. LATECOMERS will only be admitted to the auditorium if there is a suitable break in the performance. RECORDING is not permitted in the auditorium without the prior consent of Southbank Centre. Southbank Centre reserves the right to confiscate video or sound equipment and hold it in safekeeping until the performance has ended. MOBILES, PAGERS AND WATCHES should be switched off before the performance begins.

Debut Sounds

3

Latvian-born Eugene Birman has been commissioned and had his works performed by leading ensembles and orchestras in over a dozen countries on three continents. His career as a composer has led to appearances on the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg News,

NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’, Le Monde, Radio France and many others. Recent and current projects include commissions for the Estonian National Male Choir; the 2014 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; the Minnesota Orchestra; and Tenso, the European network of professional chamber choirs. This latter commission marked the centenary of World War I and was premiered last month in Mechelen, Belgium, by the Latvian Radio Choir. This summer, the inaugural MARmusica festival will be presented in Argentina under Eugene Birman’s creative leadership under the auspices of Banco Santander and the University of Oxford, where he is completing his DPhil degree. In addition, Eugene holds degrees from Columbia University and The Juilliard School.

Aleksandr Brusentsev is a composer who creates musical tapestries that embody the joys, complexities and contradictions of a 21st-century life in transition. Described as ‘brilliantly conceived and realised’ (Simon Bainbridge), his music has been performed

by such acclaimed artists as CHROMA, the Blossom Street Singers, Alexandra Wood and Huw Watkins. The performance of his most recent commission, by the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble in a programme also featuring the works of Oliver Knussen, was met with great acclaim. Previous recognitions include high commendations in both the Alan Bush and Eric Coates composition prizes at the Royal Academy of Music, as well as an associate placement on the London Symphony Orchestra’s Soundhub programme. Aleksandr is currently finishing an MMus degree at the RAM with Huw Watkins; working on commissions from Christina McMaster and The Hermes Experiment; and preparing an ambitious cross-disciplinary project, Connect_the_Dots.

Young Composers

Edmund Hunt is currently working towards a PhD in composition at Birmingham Conservatoire, where he studies with Edwin Roxburgh, Richard Causton and Simon Hall. His work has been performed and workshopped in the UK and abroad by ensembles including

the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Britten Sinfonia, CHROMA, Orkest de Ereprijs, Psappha and Royal Northern Sinfonia, and by soloists including Mary Wiegold and Chris Redgate. While studying at Birmingham Conservatoire he has received awards including the Conservatoire Orchestral Composition Prize and the Harry Gray Memorial Composition Prize. Edmund graduated from the University of Cambridge with a double first in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and received a distinction for his MMus from Newcastle University. Much of his music is inspired by the early mediaeval language and literature of northern Europe, and his PhD explores this area through the creation of vocal, instrumental and electroacoustic works.

© K

aupo

Kik

kas

Arne Gieshoff’s works have been performed by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony, Royal Scottish National and Philharmonia orchestras; the Luxembourg Sinfonietta; and the Phorminx Ensemble, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and SR2. He

was awarded the 2012 RPS Composition Prize and the 2014 Theodore Holland Intercollegiate Prize, and is currently Composer in Residence with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He is the 2014 Mendelssohn Scholar, an LSO Soundhub Associate, and received a fellowship for the 2014 session of the Tanglewood Music Center. Arne is completing a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music supported by an ABRSM Scholarship and an RVW Trust Award, studying with Jonathan Cole, Simon Holt and Dai Fujikura. Previous teachers include Kenneth Hesketh and Cord Meijering. He has received mentoring from Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews, Michael Gandolfi, Unsuk Chin, Philippe Hurel, Alasdair Nicolson, Sally Beamish, Richard Baker and Gerald Barry.

© A

lan

Wild

smit

h-T

owle

© S

oph

ie W

righ

t

4

Foyle Future Firsts

The 15 members of the Foyle Future Firsts Programme are gifted and talented instrumentalists who aspire to be professional orchestral musicians. We seek to bridge their transition between college and the professional platform, developing talented players to form the base for future orchestral appointments with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and other orchestras and ensembles around the world.

Now in its tenth year, our unique programme has gone from strength to strength. Members are supported and nurtured to the highest standards and we are proud to see current and past Foyle Future Firsts taking professional engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and other world-class ensembles. Members of the Foyle Future Firsts Programme benefit from individual lessons and mentoring from London Philharmonic Orchestra Principals, training seminars on audition techniques, and mock auditions. They also have opportunities to play in full orchestral rehearsals throughout the year, take part in high-profile and unique chamber performances, and work alongside London Philharmonic Orchestra musicians on education and community projects.

lpo.org.uk/futurefirsts

On stage tonight

First Violin Geoffrey Lynn

Chair supported by Caroline, Jamie & Zander Sharp

Kate Cole* Caroline Frenkel

Second Violin Marie-Anne Mairesse Nilufar Alimaksumova*

Viola Susanne Martens Martin Wray*

Cello Gregory Walmsley Adam Szabo*

Double Bass George Peniston Ben Wolstenholme*

Flute/Piccolo Stewart McIlwham Diego Aceña Moreno*

Oboe/Cor Anglais Fraser MacAulay Lydia Griffiths*

Clarinet/Bass Clarinet Thomas Watmough Joe Shiner*

Bassoon/Contrabassoon Emma Harding Ide Ni Chonaill*

Trumpet Paul Beniston Will Roberts*

Horn Mark Vines Elise Campbell*

Trombone/ Bass Trombone David Whitehouse Chris Augustine*

Harp Olivia Jageurs*

Piano Catherine Edwards Katherine Tinker*

Percussion Eddy Hackett Feargus Brennan*

Guitar Dan Thomas†

Synthesizer Clíodna Shanahan

Sampler Trigger Martin Wray*

Electronics Jonathan Green†

* 2013/14 Foyle Future First † guest

© B

enja

min

Eal

oveg

a

5

Clement Powerconductor

Born in London in 1980, Clement Power studied at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music, London. He was then appointed Assistant Conductor of Ensemble Intercontemporain, Paris.

Described by The Telegraph as ‘a brilliantly incisive and persuasive conductor’,

Clement has conducted some of the world’s leading orchestras and new-music ensembles. Orchestras he has recently conducted include the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Orchestre de Bretagne, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg. He is a frequent guest with ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Ensemble Contrechamps (Geneva), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Ensemble Intercontemporain. He has been the guest of international festivals including Wien Modern, Lucerne Festival, Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt International Summer Festival, Salzburg Diagonale and the IRCAM Agora.

Passionately committed to the performance of new music, he has collaborated with composers including Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Harvey, Tristan Murail, Benedict Mason, Georg Friedrich Haas, Julian Anderson and Olga Neuwirth, as well as many of the outstanding composers of his own generation. He has conducted at festivals including Lucerne Festival, Wien Modern, Warsaw Autumn, Salzburg Diagonale, Darmstadt International Summer Festival, Acht Brucken (Cologne), Sacrum Profanum (Krakow) and the IRCAM Agora (Paris).

Clement Power has recorded CDs for col legno and KAIROS Records, including the world premiere of the opera Hypermusic Prologue by Hector Parra with Ensemble Intercontemporain, and portrait discs of Marko Nikodijevic (with MusikFabrik), and Gerald Resch and Agata Zubel (with Klangforum Wien).

© C

lau

dia

Wilt

on

Julian Anderson has been Composer in Residence of the London Philharmonic Orchestra since 2010, a position that he will relinquish this summer. Born in London in 1967, he studied composition with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail. His first acknowledged work, Diptych (1990), won

the 1992 Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Young Composers and his two commissions for the London Sinfonietta, Khorovod and Alhambra Fantasy, have been widely performed in Europe and the USA. His other most-played works include the orchestral BBC Proms commission The Stations of the Sun and the chamber work Poetry Nearing Silence, a commission from the Nash Ensemble.

From 1996–2001 Anderson was Composer in Residence with Sinfonia 21; from 2000–05 he was Composer in Association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; and in 2002 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘Music of Today’ series.

His interest in choral music led to a BBC Proms commission, Heaven is Shy of Earth, and to his Alleluia, commissioned by Southbank Centre to open the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall in 2007. Anderson was asked to compose a piece for the opening of the 2013 BBC Proms and the resulting piece, Harmony, was given a dazzling premiere by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. His LPO commission The Discovery of Heaven was awarded a 2013 South Bank Sky Arts Award and a CD of this work, together with Fantasias and The Crazed Moon, was released on the LPO Label in 2013 (LPO-0074). His new opera Thebans was premiered at English National Opera last month, and this season he also began a three-year post as Composer in Residence at Wigmore Hall, where his String Quartet No. 2 was premiered last month by the Arditti Quartet.

Previously Head of Composition at London’s Royal College of Music, Julian is currently Professor of Composition and Composer in Residence at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Julian AndersonComposer in Residence and Young Composers mentor

© M

auri

ce F

oxal

l

6

Introductionby Julian Anderson, LPO Composer in Residence and Young Composers Mentor

I have wanted to programme George Lewis’s music for a long time. I first encountered his music at IRCAM in Paris in the 1980s, where he conducted pathbreaking research into the rules of improvisation and into timbre. Lewis defies classification more than most: his music feeds on various traditions – classical, jazz, free jazz, African American, avant garde, contemporary – in a fresh and powerful way. This music is not in any sense ‘crossing over’ between categories. Rather it forms a new and strongly personal language from various diverse and colourful sources.

The Will to Adorn, which I first heard shortly after its premiere in New York by ICE a couple of years ago, is one of the most intensely vivid instrumental canvases of recent years. Celebrating the colourful hats worn by African American women, and celebrating adornment and colour generally for their own sake, it is a joyous explosion of sound and energy that involves almost everyone in the ensemble all the time, yet has plenty of contrast and a wonderfully surprising narrative shape. The strength of character displayed in this music is rare in present times, and very much needed. Whilst certainly informed by the composer’s expertise as one of the leading jazz improvisers of our day, this music is also marvellously rich in sonic ambiguity and polyphonic invention. I certainly identify very much with its great openness towards the whole range of sound – one of several factors that link it with my own Book of Hours being played later in tonight’s concert. The devotion to colour and ornament for their own sake, as well as the love of complex timbres, are other factors clearly in

Programme notes

common between Lewis’s work and mine. For all these various reasons, it is a joy to present The Will to Adorn’s UK premiere in tonight’s concert.

As usual in this June concert, the LPO players, the Foyle Future First players, conductor Clement Power and myself have been working with the four young composers for some months in workshops and seminars, leading to the composition and performance of the new pieces you hear tonight. All four composers have a lot to say and fascinating ways to say it. I know that both the players and Clement join me in congratulating them on their high levels of invention and imagination in these new works. It has been a fascinating and exhilarating process to observe them being brought to completion.

I don’t normally programme my own music. The idea of including my Book of Hours in this concert came from tonight’s conductor Clement Power and from Patrick Bailey, former LPO Education & Community Director. Since this will be my last official concert as Composer in Residence with the LPO, the Orchestra’s management overruled my reluctance on this matter. Somewhat embarrassed though I am at its inclusion, perhaps it does make a fitting conclusion to my three very happy years in residence with this wonderful orchestra, to whom I remain deeply indebted and lastingly grateful. I am happy, too, to pass the torch onto such a wonderful and generous composer as Magnus Lindberg, who starts with the Orchestra in this post in the coming autumn. Julian Anderson, June 2014

GEORGE LEWIS (born 1952) The Will to Adorn (2011) George Lewis takes the title of this piece from a 1934 essay by Zora Neale Hurston, Characteristics of Negro Expression. Key phrases for Lewis are: ‘The stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident seem too bare’, ‘decorating a decoration’, and ‘one always finds a glut of gaudy calendars’. However, the identification of ‘the will to adorn’ as characteristic of a particular racial-cultural group – an identification no doubt defensible eight decades ago as an assertion of identity – is here not accepted without question.

Describing his interest as ‘adornment as a compositional attitude or method’, Lewis distances himself from any

Programme

George Lewis The Will to Adorn Arne Gieshoff UmschreibungEdmund Hunt Argatnél

Interval: 20 minutes

Eugene Birman Manifesto Aleksandr Brusentsev Our Own Light Julian Anderson Book of Hours

7

naive view of it as a marker, and his references include not only ‘those amazing church hats worn by African American women’ but also ideas of ‘saturation’ put forward by the French composer Franck Bedrossian.

He has further proposed the following longer quotation from Hurston’s essay as relevant to his composition:‘I saw in Mobile a room in which there was an overstuffed mohair living-room suite, an imitation mahogany bed and chifferobe, a console Victrola. The walls were gaily papered with Sunday supplements of the Mobile Register. There were seven calendars and three wall pockets. One of them was decorated with a lace doily. The mantel-shelf was covered with a scarf of deep homemade lace, looped up with a huge bow of pink crepe paper. Over the door was a huge lithograph showing the Treaty of Versailles being signed with a Waterman fountain pen. It was grotesque, yes. But it indicated the desire for beauty. And decorating a decoration, as in the case of the doily on the gaudy wall pocket, did not seem out of place to the hostess. The feeling back of such an act is that there can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much.’Paul Griffiths

ARNE GIESHOFF (born 1988) Umschreibung Umschreibung presents a slow, orbitally moving organism. The German term Umschreibung takes on a double meaning relating both to the rhetorical concept of periphrasing, and to the process of rewriting. Both interpretations are of conceptual and procedural significance: musical objects of differing shapes shift in and out of focus while never truly revealing their focal point but rather describing a circular motion around it; initial objects and structures have been overwritten, rewritten and resequenced with those procedures taking on a relevance of their own as part of the compositional process.

Umschreibung is part of a cycle of works that also comprises the string quartet Unwuchten (‘imbalances’), the oboe solo piece Wucherung (‘proliferation’), and verdreht (‘contorted’, ‘distorted’, ‘perverted’, ‘pixilated’, ‘wry’…) for trombone, melodica and scordatura melodica. AG

EDMUND HUNT (born 1982) Argatnél ‘Bran deems it a marvellous beautyto sail in his little coracle across the clear sea,while to me in my chariot,it is a flowery plain on which he rides about’ (Immram Bran – ‘The Voyage of Bran’, c.8th century AD, translated from Irish)

This extract, from an early Irish tale about a voyage to a strange yet beautiful ‘otherworld’, provided the imaginative starting point for the piece. ‘Argatnél’ (literally ‘silver cloud’) is a poetic term for this otherworld. The piece is not programmatic. However the text suggested a number of musical ideas, including harmony, and an undulating quality which is expressed both in individual phrases and in the form of longer sections. The opening clarinet solo (which was written as the first response to the text) forms the basis of all subsequent harmonic and melodic material, undergoing a number of transformations in the course of the piece. EH

Interval: 20 minutes

EUGENE BIRMAN (born 1987) Manifesto A faraway folk-song of unknown provenance; the memory of things that might not have ever been; the music one hears in the gaze of one’s reflection: I have explored paradoxes in my music before but never has a piece been so obsessive, so obsessively devoted to finding the sound of the surreal, quantum world of the senses. From the external silence into a deepening inner cacophony where each motion, each blinking of an eye, is an event of music, I tore out what sounded to me like a folk-song. Its every gesture, motion, shape, its unfamiliarity, its faltering presence in my memory, formed the totality of this piece.

There is nothing more here but that.

To focus so singularly has been a dream of mine, to avoid all musical contact in the form of ‘inspiration’, and instead to construct a world so impenetrable that what arises, arises ex nihilo. Here is a piece of non-linear time

8

The right is reserved to substitute artists and to vary the programme if necessary. Southbank Centre is a registered charity No. 298909. The London Philharmonic Orchestra is a registered charity No. 238045. London Philharmonic Orchestra, 89 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TP. lpo.org.uk

(in fact, it can be said without reservation that it is ten seconds of music, measured as ten minutes), of a tune that loses its structure and context before it is ever really sung. And then there is a moment when time really does stop, but instead of a most deafening silence, I try to create quiet and solitude in sound instead.

I have tried to write the sound of those things, to leave the cracks wide open – to listen and find the music wholly within. EB ALEkSANDR BRUSENTSEV (born 1987) Our Own Light Inspired by a Stanley Kubrick quote, Our Own Light weaves together a narrative that explores the search for meaning in an indifferent world.

The piece opens with a strident quasi-overture whose walls of sound establish the sonic and harmonic language from which the rest of the piece is developed. From the overture’s dissonant and abrupt ending, four violins emerge as the harmonic headwaters of a stream that leads to the very end of the piece. Emerging from this stream, fragmented thematic material is juxtaposed, overlaid and developed, while echoes of the overture ring fresh against the changing harmony. As the piece progresses, the playful and mysterious material grows dark whilst the echoes of the wall remain unmoved. Both because of and in spite of this indifference, a fresh sense of the material develops and brings the piece to a close. AB

‘However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.’ – Stanley Kubrick

JULIAN ANDERSON (born 1967) Book of Hours (2004)

1 Part One2 Part Two This piece was inspired by two great works of late medieval art: the ‘Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry’ and the ‘Tapisseries La Dame à Licorne’ (The Lady and the Unicorn), currently held in the Musée du Moyen Age in Paris. The two parts of this work do not literally portray or depict either of the medieval artefacts. Rather, the moods, harmonies, melodies and instrumental colours were prompted by them. Also the form of this piece unfolds like a Book of Hours – a sequence of events connected into a chronological thread, each sharply contrasted. Through it all a single unifying idea returns in many guises – the first four notes of the major scale. The real subject of the music is indeed just intervals themselves. I wanted to rediscover for myself what, for example, a major second, a perfect fourth or a fifth could be and how these sounds could be interpreted afresh. There is some use of electronic sound – generally as an extra colour beyond the ensemble sounds, rather as gold-leaf might be applied in a medieval manuscript. The two large parts are quite different in character and harmony, as will be immediately apparent, I hope. However, they start with the same music – except that, in Part Two the opening of Part One is played back as if heard on a scratchy, poorly-pressed 33 1/3 record (perhaps from the former Eastern Bloc … I have strong memories of buying such records from ‘Collets’ in London, in order to hear the latest new music from Poland, Russia or Romania).

Thereafter Part Two proceeds by recomposing Part One as if in ‘fast forward’; eventually breaking off on a quite different path altogether. There is occasional allusion throughout the piece to the modal techniques of medieval music, without any literal pastiche or quotation. After a substantial electronic cadenza, the coda introduces new musical ideas over sporadic reminiscences of earlier sections.

Book of Hours was commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group as part of my Composer-In-Association residency, with generous financial assistance from the Michael Vyner Trust and the BCMG Sound Investment Scheme. It is dedicated in admiration to Barrie Gavin. Julian Anderson