The M1 motorway is 60 years old! BBC Radio 3 commissioned the composer Alex Woolf and documentary producer Laurence Grissell to create a 40 minute symphony commemorating the dramatic change the road made to the landscape and the lives of those who travel and work on it. The result is a unique tapestry of new interviews, archive recordings, ambient sounds and original music.
You can listen to the BBC Philharmonic performing the work here.
The Nottingham Phil season got off to a great start with the first performance of Adam Gorb’s clarinet concerto since it’s RLPO premiere in 1999. Read the excellent review here.
The RNCM autumn term is also well under way. I conducted Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance in October (a first for me!), and our We Are Migrants season allowed a rare performance of Erwin Schulhoff’s fantastic Concerto for string quartet and winds.
There still a handful of places available on the fantastic course at Sherborne this summer. Details of this very special week are available here.
Nigel Osborne
A busy week of contemporary music coming up. On Thursday I’m delighted to be conducting Psappha’s final concert of the season, which includes Nigel Osborne’s incredibly evocative Bosnian Voices. Written to mark 20 years since the conclusion of the war in Bosnia (a conflict in which the composer was a humanitarian volunteer) it is a set of arrangements based on songs written by inhabitants of Srebrenica.
Sir George Benjamin
On Saturday the RNCM New Ensemble will be at the Wigmore Hall presenting a study day of the music of Sir George Benjamin.
A typically busy autumn term at the RNCM saw me recording a CD of Martin Ellerby’s music with the Wind Orchestra, a classical programme of Mozart and Haydn with the Concert Orchestra, a major festival of the music of Kaija Saariaho, amongst several other performances.
RNCM New Ensemble rehearsing Saariaho
The conducting department welcomed David Hill as our new International Chair in Choral Conducting. As well as classes with David, there were also 4 masterclasses with Sir Mark Elder and 1 with Vassily Sinaisky. As always, the students also conducted in several public concerts each, and acted as assistant conductors to the BBC Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata, Psappha, and Fodens Brass Band.
I’ll be teaching a new masterclass organised by the WMC Kerkrade organisation in July. 3 days with outstanding professional ensembles promise to make it a fantastic event.
A fantastic collaboration between the Nottingham Phil and the RNCM Opera Department saw a semi-staged performance of Act IV from Puccini’s La Boheme in October. Read the review.
Iain Henderson, Lauren Coulter, Eliza Boom, Peter Liedbetter, Lachlan Lawton and Tim Bagley
Adam Gorb's new opera, which I conducted the premiere of in June, now has a dedicated website here. You can also watch a video of the entire piece.
After the exhilaration and intensity of the premiere of Adam's opera in June (review); a brilliant end to the Nottingham Philharmonic season ("And to end: Debussy's La Mer, in which Heron and the NPO ensured that every tiny detail, every flute flurry, every percussion stroke, every muted trumpet note was coloured and focused with pinpoint precision."); several fun projects in July culminating in 2 wonderful weeks at Sherborne (featuring the music of Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen) and the amazing Dirigentuka course in Stavanger; it's finally time for a break!
Dates for the autumn are now on the schedule page.
Delighted to have been able to put together this exciting project with my colleagues Morten Wensberg in Stavanger, and Andre Granjo in Aveiro. We'll be developing a MOOC and researching approaches to the use of technology in the teaching conducting.
