November 13, 2008
LCO and United Visual Artists at Covent Garden
Monday 17 November 2008, 6pm
Covent Garden Market
This coming Monday LCO will open Covent Garden’s Christmas Lights festival alongside United Visual Artists, a British-based collective whose work spans permanent architectural installation, live performance and responsive installation. UVA have collaborated with the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Basement Jaxx, The Chemical Brothers and Massive Attack (above).
The 45-minute set will showcase a selection of works by living composers, and the LCO will be joined for the evening by sopranos Alexandra Kennedy and Olivia Safe.
Entry is free and no booking is required. Click here for more information from the Covent Garden London site.
PHOTO: United Visual Artists / Massive Attack, Royal Festival Hall © Antonio Pagano
October 15, 2008
October review: Xenakis/Britten/Hall/Greenwood/Messiaen
“A fine end to an absorbing evening and confirmation of the standard that the London Contemporary Orchestra has consistently achieved. On this basis, the second season can only be keenly awaited.”
This last concert in the London Contemporary Orchestra’s first season featured a wide-ranging programme including one premiere and two little-heard works from early in their composer’s careers.
Xenakis’s Le Sacrifice (1953) only became available for performance after his death in 2001. Originally the second part of a triptych entitled Anastènaria, it was put aside after the final part, Metastasis, had launched Xenakis’s composing career in 1955. Uncharacteristic Le Sacrifice may be in comparison, yet its fragmentary textures and microtonal inflections already confirm the Greek-born composer was to be no mere imitator of the European avant-garde. Hugh Brunt secured a committed response from the LCO; the music’s static and dynamic elements fusing to potent effect in the final stages.
Hard to believe that only a decade separates this piece from Britten’s “Serenade” (1943) – the song-cycle assembled while the composer was putting together his opera “Peter Grimes”, and which remains among his most enduring works. Although a last-minute replacement, Andrew O’Brien was clearly no stranger to the piece – his mellifluous tone happily not given to the over-characterisation that has affected many performances in recent years, while bringing a suitably sombre response to the Blake setting of ‘Elegy’ and deathly pallor to the cantus firmus that runs through the anonymous ‘Dirge’. Although not without flaw, Nicholas Ireson’s horn-playing was confidently projected – as in the unaccompanied ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue’ – lacked nothing in ruminative intensity. Brunt might have adopted slightly quicker tempos in several songs, but his interpretative focus was rarely in doubt; not least the sustained radiance in the Keats setting of ‘Sonnet’ with which the vocal sequence closes.
The second half began with a first outing for Emily Hall’s Put Flesh On! (2008). This arresting piece combined a recording of the Reverend Audrey Branson (of the Church of the Open Door, Philadelphia) in full flight along with its resourceful electronic transformation; together with a glowering undertow of Hammond organ, these then became components of a diverse ensemble with cello as ‘first among equals’. The outcome was a powerful if claustrophobic 12 minutes – Oliver Coates coping ably with a demanding concertante role – with (given the starting-point) absolutely no overtones of Steve Reich.
Quite a contrast with the study for string orchestra which followed. Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver (2005) was inspired by his memories of childhood car journeys, with the imagined sound of a limited selection of cassettes merging from the noise of the engine so the two became as one in the mind’s ear. A substantial piece in three main sections, it builds through a juxtaposition of ‘white noise’ and chorale-like harmony (the first redolent of the texture music in early Penderecki, with the central episode employing pizzicato and col legno techniques to ominous effect). The final section rather suggests Xenakis in its volatile dynamics and ‘wide angle’ glissandos, before a sustained emotional apex. Although the piece outstayed its welcome on this occasion, the quality of the LCO’s response was such as to make one curious as to Greenwood’s next move in the orchestral domain.
Nor could it be faulted in the last work. Les Offrandes Oubliées (1931) was Messiaen’s first publicly performed orchestral piece and, though already typical in its religious preoccupations, is far from characteristic in musical terms. Yet here the Debussy-inspired modality of the opening ‘Trés lent’ had real plangency, the Honegger-related fury of the central ‘Vif’ exploded with energy, and the more personal expression of the final ‘Extrêment lent’ had a sustained ecstasy that arose naturally from what preceded it – lending an overall coherence to the work such as it does not necessarily possess.
A fine end to an absorbing evening and confirmation of the standard that the London Contemporary Orchestra has consistently achieved. On this basis, the second season can only be keenly awaited.
Richard Whitehouse, Classical Source
PHOTO: London Contemporary Orchestra, LSO St Luke’s © Darren Bloom
October 6, 2008
LCO appointed Ensemble-in-Association at Brunel University
We are excited to announce our recent appointment as Ensemble-in-Association at Brunel University.
Brunel is widely recognised as one of the most forward-thinking and creative universities around, with a musical focus firmly in the present. Staff include some of the leading figures in European contemporary music, such as composers Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox and Peter Wiegold, and pianist Sarah Nicolls.
LCO looks forward to this new relationship with Brunel, which will encompass workshops, concerts, collaborative projects and other exchanges.
October 5, 2008
Call for Scores!
We are very pleased to announce LCO’s inaugural Call for Scores. Composers of any age and nationality are invited to submit previously unperformed works scored for ensemble of 6 – 15 players.
A shortlist of four works will be selected for workshop on Sunday 11 January 2009 at The Warehouse, Waterloo. The day will be led by newly appointed Composer-in-Association, Jonathan Cole, with the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Baldur Brönnimann. A panel of distinguished musicians present at the workshop, including Rolf Hind, will subsequently select one piece to receive its first performance in the LCO’s May 2009 concert.
The closing date for applications is Monday 15 December 2008. Click here to download full details and an application form.
September 29, 2008
Final concert SOLD OUT
With just under two weeks to go, our Friday 10 October concert has sold out! However, by subscribing to the LSO’s SMS Returns Queue you can receive texts to let you know once seats are released. Text LSO RETURNS to 60123 or click here to read more.
September 16, 2008
LCO featured in NME News
News of a return of Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver to LSO St Luke’s seems to be spreading fast. The work was first performed at LSO St Luke’s by the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2005, and subsequently went on to win the BBC Radio 3 Listeners’ Award at the British Composer Awards. Click here to read the feature in NME.
Popcorn Superhet Receiver will be performed alongside music from Xenakis, Britten, Messiaen and Emily Hall (see below) on Friday 10 October. Tickets are going fast, so click here to book!
PHOTO: Jonny Greenwood © Zach Klein
September 10, 2008
September review: Holt/Cole/Alexander
“Amongst London’s thriving new music scene the London Contemporary Orchestra must surely rank as one of the major players..”
Amongst London’s thriving new music scene the London Contemporary Orchestra must surely rank as one of the major players, boasting as it does a terrific pool of young talent who ably brought to life two exciting premieres at this concert.
Colin Alexander’s string quartet, Potential Fracture Lines, commissioned by the LCO, is a stunning work, pulsating with a maturity and conviction that belied the composer’s youthfulness. According to Alexander, the piece is “specifically written to stimulate the ear and therefore the mind”. While one might wonder just what the point of a piece not written to stimulate the ear would be, it can’t be denied that the work makes demands on listeners’ minds that the rest of the pieces played here did not.
Although at first the quartet seemed to be mired in the weary round of ‘special effects’ so de rigueur in contemporary music – Alexander having the performers use the instruments in almost every way except the way Mozart would have – it was the work’s structure that grabbed and held the interest, and, for once, to use an analogy from the film world, the special effects actually provided the plot rather than replacing it. Intricately constructed, the piece worked its way through the transformation and development of a number of sound-cells (thirteen according to the programme note, though I’m not sure anyone was counting) and this structure, whilst undoubtedly subtle, was also obvious enough at times to give the listener the comforting knowledge that it was there – the proverbial iceberg, impressive for the ten percent that was visible, but even more impressive for the ninety percent that remained non-discerned, at least on first listening. Click here to read the full review.
David Bignell, Classical Source
August 12, 2008
Emily Hall Commission: “Put Flesh On!”
LCO’s October concert sees the world premiere of Emily Hall’s Put Flesh On! written for solo cello, electronics and orchestra. The commission has been generously supported by the Britten-Pears Foundation. Below, Emily offers a little introduction to the piece and talks about the ideas behind it:
“The basis for this piece is an intense and emotional sermon delivered by the Reverend Audrey F. Branson, a lady pastor of the Church of the Open Door of Philadelphia. Her preaching and distorted versions of the Hammond organ she is playing form the basis of the tape part which is juxtaposed and enhanced by the orchestra and solo cello played by Olly Coates.
As she is increasingly swept away by the emotion of her exhortations she appears to leave herself behind and enters a possessed state. The cello not only imitates the preacher quite literally but it also has its own music, representing the self she has left behind. Her sung/spoken and cried out declarations make powerful material and I hope my music offers another side to her internal psyche.”
Put Flesh On! receives its first performance alongside music from Xenakis, Britten, Jonny Greenwood and Messiaen on Friday 10 October 8pm at LSO St Luke’s. Click here to book tickets.
PHOTO: Emily Hall © Joe Dilworth
July 10, 2008
LCO featured in Classical Music magazine
IN THE BEGINNING
“We take youth orchestras for granted these days, but how did the whole movement begin? And how is it being developed? Jack Holloway investigates the rise and rise of the youth orchestra”
“..Although many of these orchestras have been set up or overseen by adults of organisations, in a very recent and exciting development young people have started to take things into their own hands. The 54-strong London Contemporary Orchestra is the brainchild of composer and conductor Hugh Brunt and violist Robert Ames. The players came up with the idea during their time in the NYO, feeling that London needed a new pre-professional youth orchestra with a different approach to playing and promoting large-scale contemporary repertoire.
After graduating last summer, they set about raising funds and enlisting the help of some big guns in the contemporary music world, such as Thomas Adès, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Mark-Anthony Turnage (now their honorary patron), to get the orchestra off the ground. This culminated in an inaugural concert at LSO St Luke’s on 15 March where the orchestra performed Turnage and John Scofield’s Scorched with a jazz trio.
What is so unique about this project is that the artistic directors are not seasoned professionals but a pair of 22-year-olds. This brings the venture a grass-roots perspective and a wide-eyed enthusiasm that could only exist in an orchestra run by young people for young people. As Hugh puts it: ‘We met with our marketing team [300million] and they said, “Our spectrum for marketing approaches goes from this end which is safe to this end which is brave-to-bonkers. Where do you want the LCO to be in it?” Rob and I went for the brave-to-bonkers end of the spectrum.’
The result is a four-concert inaugural season that includes two new LCO commissions, by Emily Hall and Colin Alexander, as well as two world premieres and a London premiere of an Erkki-Sven Tüür piece. Not bad for an orchestra run by a couple of graduates. And with plans to throw sonic and video artists into the orchestral mix for their next season it looks like the LCO is only just getting started. One wonders just exactly how bonkers things might get for the youth orchestras of the future.”
Classical Music, 5 July 2008
June 18, 2008
June reviews: Tüür/Saariaho/Adès/Sibelius
“Another fine showing, then, for an orchestra and conductor whose ambition so far shows no sign of outstripping their achievement.”
LISTEN TO CLIPS FROM THIS CONCERT:
Erkki-Sven Tüür Searching for Roots (Hommage à Sibelius) PLAY
Kaija Saariaho Nymphea Reflection PLAY
Thomas Adès Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’ PLAY
Sibelius Tapiola PLAY
Thomas Gould (violin)
Hugh Brunt (conductor)
Following on from its highly successful inaugural concert of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Scorched, the London Contemporary Orchestra here consolidated its standing in a diverse yet cohesive programme with a distinctly Nordic edge.
Although the composer has spent the greater part of her career in Paris, Kaija Saariaho’s music has never lost that luminous austerity which might reasonably be called ‘Nordic’. Nor is there anything routine about the realisation of her string quartet ‘Nymphea’ as the present work for string orchestra, Nymphea Reflection. Previous hearings have suggested that the separating-out of its six constituent sections sacrifices overall momentum, but this does serve to throw the always-fastidious contrasts in timbre and texture into distinct and more-audible relief. If this account was at its most gripping in the even- numbered, expressively immediate sections, then an attention to detail and balance was evident throughout, Hugh Brunt ensuring that Saariaho’s rarefied soundworld was not without a corresponding emotional dimension – not least in the final ‘Misterioso’, with its fragments of a poem by Tarkovsky whispered by the musicians and insinuating themselves into the musical fabric.
Written for and associated to date with Anthony Marwood, Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto is evidently a work admitting of a variety of interpretations and received such a performance from Thomas Gould. Thus ‘Rings’ had an assertiveness which gave it more presence than hitherto, Gould relishing the incisive polyrhythmic interplay between soloist and orchestra that arguably made more of this Ligeti-cum-John Adams synthesis, while ‘Paths’ evinced a greater (though never unsubtle) emotion in the confronting of the soloist’s lyrically intense writing with the orchestra’s stabbing interjections and often-volatile textures, then ‘Rounds’ exuded aggression (albeit of the more playful kind) as well as irony such as helped to bring about a greater sense of formal and expressive closure. With Brunt ensuring disciplined and tightly co-ordinated playing throughout, this was an appreciably different and, moreover, convincing take on a piece that continues to impress and dismay in almost equal measure.
Framing these works were pieces respectively inspired by, and by, Sibelius. Designated a ‘Hommage’, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Searching for Roots draws from its array of post-Modernist and post-Minimalist techniques a resourceful and cumulative 7-minute span that pursues a downward trajectory as intently as it fashions its multi-layered textures into autonomous melodic lines. As a curtain-raiser, this assuredly holds the attention and was giving a bracing realisation by the LCO.
As was Sibelius’s Tapiola. This has accrued a formidable performing tradition over eight decades but Brunt did not shirk the challenge – finding a very plausible accommodation between the extremes of stasis and dynamism within which the work unfolds but without undue emphasis on either so as not to impede its underlying momentum. Music in constant transition, Tapiola is Sibelius at his most determinedly elusive, but there was little sense of tentativeness or uncertainty here; rather a willingness to let individual ‘events’ register in themselves without drawing attention away from the whole. The climactic string crescendo could have yielded even greater physicality, and the final bars were arguably too inward, even passive for this most disquieting of resolutions, but Brunt had the measure of this masterpiece and the LCO responded with playing that – if a little bass-light in tutti passages – combined control and spontaneity with an interpretative conviction that rarely faltered.
Another fine showing, then, for an orchestra and conductor whose ambition so far shows no sign of outstripping their achievement. Two more concerts in this first season are scheduled (September 6 and October 10), and those yet to hear this partnership in action should certainly take time to do so.
Richard Whitehouse, Classical Source
The London Contemporary Orchestra is a young ensemble, both in terms of its players (who are mostly recent graduates and current students) and its formation (this is the ensemble’s debut season). In the current climate, it is impressive that an orchestra of this kind can be formed, and the orchestra’s Artistic Directors, violist Robert Ames and conductor Hugh Brunt are to be congratulated for their endeavours. It is exciting to find that such enthusiasm for contemporary repertoire exists and that there are people willing to invest the necessary determination and hard work to make concerts such as these happen. Contrary also to reports that the British concert-going generation is a dying breed, I spotted many under 35s in the healthy sized audience. I have a good feeling about the state of contemporary music in this country, despite the lack of funding. With enough determination and the contemporary music community pulling together to help each other, the future is bright.
The concert was well programmed, and performed with assured technical control. Under Brunt’s baton, Tüür’s Searching for Roots (Homage to Sibelius) was given a convincing London premiere. This was a well-conceived work which begins with high pitched clusters on flutes and glockenspiels and undergoes a gradual transition through the orchestra’s pitch range until the atmospheric end, heard in a blend of cellos and low percussion. The playing was precise and well rehearsed, showing an understanding of the repertoire which bubbled with youthful enthusiasm.
I was slightly less convinced by Saariaho’s Nymphea Reflection. This is a wonderful work, initially approached as a reworking of her string quartet, Nymphea, but eventually becoming a new work in its own right, using Nymphea as its starting point. Saariaho uses contemporary string techniques combined with creative orchestration to recreate the sound of live electronics, despite the absence of any actual processing. The work is in six parts, each capturing a different mood, as described in the movement’s title. The playing was, once again, assured and precise, with some excellent accented passages breaking through the texture and some carefully performed solos from the section leaders. Mention should also be made of the double bass section, who excelled throughout. The performance as a whole, though, lacked the poetic emotion that one associates with Saariaho; it was not until the magical opening of the sixth movement with its cello trills and whispered texts that the music came to life.
Adès’s Violin Concerto is a tantalizing piece, full of character and charm. The baroque-influenced opening movement was thoroughly enjoyable, with Gould’s dazzling solo violin surrounded by a warm orchestral sound. The second movement forms the centrepiece of this triptych, and is altogether heavier, both musically and emotionally. The opening punctuated chords were played with precise ensemble and a well blended sound, combined with perfect intonation. The solo lines were expressively played and had the sense of being a single voice among the crowd, with the orchestral material supporting effectively. There were some beautifully performed solos from the flute section, and some impressive playing from the horn section. The musical direction was maintained well, except for a few central moments when the full orchestral sound overpowered the soloist. There were some breathtaking and powerful moments, taking in a whole range of emotions, leading to the end with its wonderfully hypnotic and transfixing repetitions of pitch sets. The final movement is much lighter, with changing time signatures and ritualistic drumming. The solo part was well controlled, with its long lines giving a melancholy contemplation to the proceedings. This was an excellent performance, with a soloist who commands attention and performs with style.
The final work in the programme was Sibelius’s Tapiola. Contemporary in its outlook, it is a musically challenging piece which is as far-reaching as it is beautiful. The orchestra’s approach here was as one would expect for a Sibelius Tone Poem – richly sonorous, full of expression and hinting at romantic (I would be very interested to hear them play the Saariaho with the same approach). This was an all-consuming performance, with clear phrasing and well placed accents. There was some excellent playing from all sections of the orchestra and the piece provided a finale to the concert of which these players deserved to be proud.
Carla Rees, MusicWeb International
PHOTO: Thomas Gould © Sussie Ahlburg
