July 29, 2010
LCO head north for UK tour with Belle and Sebastian
The Sage Gateshead Sunday 5 December
Symphony Hall, Birmingham Monday 6 December
Manchester Apollo Tuesday 7 December
Following a successful collaboration with Belle and Sebastian at this year’s Latitude Festival performing to an audience of 30,000, the LCO will rejoin the band for a mini-tour in December, taking in The Sage Gateshead, Manchester Apollo, and Symphony Hall, Birmingham. The project revives Belle and Sebastian’s acclaimed performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2006. Click here for more information and to book tickets.
PHOTO: www.fosterandpartners.com
June 30, 2010
LCO at Village Underground: The Times review ★★★★
Geoff Brown
Wednesday 30 June 2010
Imagine that you’re fairly short, wearing a long dress and holding a precious violin. Would you want to reach the raised performance platform by jumping? Full marks, then, to Charlotte Bonneton, a soloist in this Spitalfields Festival concert, for never coming a cropper - and for playing with such gusto, though that was a mark of everyone in the London Contemporary Orchestra, dedicated to the new, the recent, and the cross-cultural.
The culture crossed here was film, represented by the Brothers Quay, those unique purveyors of puppet animation puzzles bedecked with more vintage European angst, more decrepit dolls and gizmos, than is really good for sanity. We saw their masterly Street of Crocodiles from 1983, sprung from a story by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz.
The cries and whispers of Lech Jankowski’s score and Larry Sider’s sound design were expanded by a live string trio and piano. But the Quays’ imaginings took such a hold that the players’ haunting bits and bobs quickly sank into the general mix - the best artistic outcome possible. Even the funky venue seemed part of the film: part disused viaduct, part abandoned warehouse, with four decommissioned Tube carriages perched on the roof.
More East European modernism arrived with the disjointed style games of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No 1. Bonneton and her violin colleague Daniel Pioro fiddled their fingers almost to the bone, while prepared piano, harpsichord and strings plinked out sad melodic fragments. The furious panache of the LCO’s performance, expertly channelled by the conductor Hugh Brunt, was overwhelming.
European surrealism vanished for the tremolos, buzzes, and flying melodies of Zipangu by the gifted French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier, who was murdered in Paris in 1983 at the age of 34. Frenzied patches suggested improvisation. But no: Brunt’s conducting of every bar, from the opening buzzing bass line to the sudden consonant end assertive, was graceful, just like the music. Wonderful.
Click here to read the review on The Times website.
PHOTO: www.villageunderground.co.uk
June 27, 2010
LCO players join Foals for BBC live session at Glastonbury
Members from the LCO teamed up with Foals at Glastonbury on Friday to perform a special acoustic set for BBC 6 Music. Click here to watch Elspeth Hanson (violin/vocals), Rachel Parris (vocals/percussion) and Ric Elsworth (percussion) playing alongside the band on Spanish Sahara and their new single Miami. And click here to hear Yannis from Foals talking about the LCO to Zane Lowe on Radio 1 (51:00 mins).
PHOTO: www.bbc.co.uk/glastonbury
June 12, 2010
LCO feature in The Times
The chairman of the London Contemporary Orchestra on pushing the envelope and playing original music in quirky venues
Neil Fisher Saturday 12 June 2010
You might be forgiven for thinking that the connection between The Apprentice and classical music was limited to the thumping Prokofiev that accompanies the opening credits. But Simon Ambrose, the winner of the 2007 edition of the business talent show, says that music is his true passion: for starters, he plays piano, guitar and drums. “I’m a fan of music first, I went on the show second.”
After his two-year spell working for Lord Sugar, Ambrose has now united his two interests, as chairman of the London Contemporary Orchestra, an ensemble co-founded by his friend Hugh Brunt. “There’s a void in the market,” Ambrose claims, on message to a T. “There are loads of conventional classical orchestras, but there isn’t anyone trying to push the envelope like Hugh is. And anyone trying to come up with a new product for customers is doing a brave thing.”
It certainly takes courage to keep afloat a full-size (albeit freelance) orchestra devoted to contemporary music during a financial downturn. “We took a risk,” admits Brunt, who set up the orchestra two years ago with Robert Ames, a university friend. Yet it seems to have paid off: the LCO played to a sold-out Roundhouse in North London earlier this year, and after a concert later this month at the Spitalfields Festival (performing a new soundtrack to the creepy 1986 Brothers Quay film Street of Crocodiles) they are bound for the Latitude festival, where they will be collaborating with those whimsical Glaswegians Belle & Sebastian. “Rather than worry about how we get people in to the Southbank Centre,” Brunt says, “it’s easier to go in to quirky venues and give it to them on a plate.”
Teaming up with pop bands, he adds, comes more naturally to the LCO than the more venerable outfits (the average age in the group is 26). “Most of the music is what we would naturally listen to when we’re not with our instruments. So it’s less awkward than what you might get with some of the more established orchestras.” Brunt hopes the LCO’s next collaboration will be with another useful friend of his, the Foals front man Yannis Philippakis.
There’s only one more question for Ambrose to check that he’s fully committed. Will he give 110 per cent to this orchestra? “Due to inflationary pressures,” he quips, “I’m now prepared to give 120.”
Click here to read the feature on the Times Online site.
June 8, 2010
LCO to join Belle and Sebastian at Latitude Festival
On Saturday 17 July the LCO will team up with iconic band and Latitude headliners Belle and Sebastian on the Obelisk Stage. This is in addition to LCO’s ‘Faster Than Sound’ showcase on Friday 16 July in the Film and Music Arena. The set will centre loosely around arrangements first created for the band’s acclaimed collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2006. www.latitudefestival.co.uk
April 8, 2010
LCO shortlisted for Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards 2010
We are very excited to announce that the LCO has been shortlisted for this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, the UK’s most prestigious accolade for live classical music. The shortlist was announced live this afternoon on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, with LCO receiving a nomination in the Audience Development category - “for an imaginative project, designed to inspire and develop a new audience for live classical music-making”. Click here to ‘listen again’ to today’s In Tune on BBC iPlayer (1:38.25).
The awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday 11 May at The Dorchester, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenters Sean Rafferty and Sara Mohr-Pietsch, with awards presented by Sir John Tomlinson. This year’s keynote speech will be made by Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry. Click here for full details, and here to download the official RPS Music Awards press release.
March 30, 2010
LCO to play Latitude Festival
In association with Aldeburgh Music’s ‘Faster Than Sound’, the LCO makes its debut appearance at Latitude on Friday 16 July. LCO will collaborate with a number of groundbreaking composers and sonic artists including self-confessed ‘extreme sound freak’ Simon Fisher Turner, Mira Calix and Larry Goves, with supporting visuals from Quayola. The set also features works from John Woolrich, Claude Vivier and John Adams, conducted by Hugh Brunt. Headliners for the festival include Florence & The Machine, Belle and Sebastian and Vampire Weekend. Click here to read more and book your tickets.
March 21, 2010
MySpace and Vimeo pages updated
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January 30, 2010
LCO at the Roundhouse: Daily Telegraph review
“Young, free and singularly special. Watch out London Sinfonietta and Nash Ensemble - there’s a new kid on the block.”
Tuesday 26 January 2010
Watch out London Sinfonietta and Nash Ensemble – there’s a new kid on the block. It’s the London Contemporary Orchestra, young, keen as mustard, and able to field extravagantly large numbers of players to tackle determinedly left-field programmes – with a bit of help from Facebook and Twitter, which facilitated a last-minute appeal for extra players for John Cage’s last piece 74, which needs 74 players.
The smiling musical anarchist Cage died in 1992, which, I imagine, is before some of those players on the Roundhouse stage were born. The audience seemed much the same. So what drew them in such amazing numbers? The ambience of the Roundhouse certainly helps, with its screens above with close-up views of the players, and the whole domed space swimming in psychedelic red and blue light.
But it was surely the programme that worked the magic. It was a brilliantly contrived mix that delivered coolness, daring experimentalism, classic high-seriousness and cosmic spiritualism, all at once. The spiritual bit came first, in the form of Shhoctavoski, by Geir Jenssen, the Norwegian creator of “arctic ambient”…
Click here to read the review in full.
Ivan Hewett, Daily Telegraph
PHOTO: © Jana Chiellino/Bruce Atherton
