PERFORMANCES 2023
Feb 9th /7.30pm/Royal Holloway University
April 26th/6.30pm/Royal Academy of Music
May 11th/1pm/Blyth Centre Imperial College
June 4th/7pm/St Peter’s Church Berkhamsted
June 20th/7pm/Goldsmiths College
Nov 30th/7.30pm/Sheffield University
Dec 6th/1pm/Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
2024
Feb 13th/7pm/Cardiff University
July 14th/5pm/Red Kite Concerts Biggleswade
July 31st/3.30pm & 10pm/Three Choirs Festival. Worcester
Aug 4th/6.30pm/Norwich Chapel Concerts
**Freya Waley-Cohen**
GLASS FLOWERS World Premiere
Some words from Freya about the genesis of her trio commission, Glass Flowers: Messiaen’s annotated bird notebooks were one influence of a few. The starting point for the Uncharted Territory programme - putting the Messiaen and Crumb together - made me focus on both composers’ depictions of nature and exultation, a reverence for a vision of nature that feels so huge and cosmic. This became core to what I was thinking of, but also gave me a sense of something unreachable. As I started to write, what was coming up were fragments that felt brittle and translucent. When I was a child there was a story that I read which referred to flowers as joy that had spilled over from heaven. But my flowers felt fragile and hard, like if I pushed them up against each other they’d chip and break. I was reading a book and a there was a reference to Glass Flowers - a collection of literal glass flowers that a father and son called Blaschka made and gave to Harvard University where the now collection lives. I didn’t read further to find out about the collection, the simple pairing of the words Glass Flowers clarified the title, idea and structure for how the piece would continue. It gave me a way to treat these fragments I had created and coax them into an arrangement.
Uncharted Territory is generously
supported by The Marchus Trust
Raising the profile of music by women
A wonderful piece about some of our featured female composers, written by Roderick:
The pieces in our programme by Lili Boulanger, Dorothy Howell and Elisabeth Lutyens show fascinating cross-currents between Britain and the continent, France in particular. Lutyens – forthright, modernist and lyrical; Howell – an immensely gifted composer-pianist who enjoyed early success at the Proms; and Boulanger, the light that shone brilliantly but too briefly, the first female winner of the Prix de Rome (1913).
Howell’s music is least well-known today, though that is due for change (she is one of the subjects of Leah Broad’s newly-published ‘Quartet’). A piano student of the renowned Tobias Matthay and composer whose early orchestral work Lamia was a hit at the 1919 Proms; her ‘Spindrift’ for solo piano calls for subtleties of touch that were a Matthay hallmark. The evocative title refers to spray that is blown by the wind across the sea’s surface, and its musical realisation is a melee of alternating hands whose subtle, colourful harmonies span the English Channel. Although the constant rhythm never lets up, the textures continually vary and Howell finds ingenious ways to fashion jets of melody – white horses emerging from blue-green harmony.
What ‘Spindrift’ has in freshness, Boulanger’s famous ‘Nocturne’ equals in languor. Often heard in its transcribed version for violin and piano, we present it in its original form as a work for flute. As French music expert Caroline Potter has pointed out, this makes its allusions to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune easier to discern; its night-time setting and harmonic palette suggest that Tristan and Isolde have lain here too. But this is a beguiling piece in its own right: an impassioned single sweep with subtle but telling nuances throughout the instrumental parts.
Elisabeth Lutyens has long been recognised as influential amongst British modernists – and cosmopolitan in outlook, therefore. Her Seven Preludes of 1978 are especially vivid, all bearing titles after John Keats such as ‘strange thunders from the potency of song’. The third, ‘Starlight’, is the most concise: three lines of music, but a bold canvas of intense energy. With various recordings of her music having recently been issued her star is ascendent, without ever having left us.
Roderick Chadwick Feb 2023