TRIO 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

Nov 19th/1.05pm/Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

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.