Tuesday 18 March 2025, 7.30pm
Thrilled to present a very special four-day residency with harpist Rhodri Davies, an artist immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, bray harp, horse-hair harp, electric harp, and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released eight solo albums.
"I am excited and honoured to be curating this four-day residency. I first played at Café Oto soon after it opened 17 years ago, and it is the venue that I have performed in the most. Night 1 will feature compositions for harp written especially for me: works by artists associated with Fluxus, pioneering french composer Éliane Radigue and maverick composer Joseph Kudirka. Night 2 will present two of my compositions – including one where the brilliant pianist Siwan Rhys performs a durational piece featuring all the Amen cadences from my father’s hymn book. Night 3 will be a sounding of the early Welsh bray and horsehair harps. Night 4 ends the residency with a re-visiting of material from my Wound Response album and a free improvisation." - Rhodri Davies
PROGRAMME:
Tuesday 18
- Rhodri Davies: aqua alta
- Rhodri Davies: Amen (performed by Siwan Rhys - piano)
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
Siwan Rhys is a pianist devoted to contemporary music and collaboration with composers and other artists.
She has played at prestigious British venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Barbican Hall, St David's Hall, Symphony Hall, and abroad at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Carnegie Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Tokyo Opera City, Philharmonie de Paris, Shanghai Symphony Hall, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Esplanade Singapore and others. She has also appeared at the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Cheltenham Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, and has recorded many times for television, radio, and for labels such as NMC, all that dust, Another Timbre, Classical Remix, and Prima Facie.
Recent releases include a critically-acclaimed recording of Stockhausen's KONTAKTE and of Oliver Leith's good day good day bad day bad day with GBSR Duo, a re-voicing by Mira Calix of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, solo piano music by Ryoko Akama, a Barbara Monk Feldman portrait disc, and Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians with Colin Currie Group.
Siwan is a member of piano-percussion duo GBSR Duo and new music group Explore Ensemble. Also a regular ensemble and orchestral pianist, Siwan has worked with the London Sinfonietta, Colin Currie Group, LA Phil New Music Group, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Riot Ensemble, Clod Ensemble, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
She is an honorary member of the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards, and teaches at the London Contemporary School of Piano.
