Sunday 29 March 2015, 8pm
An evening of Salvatore Sciarrino’s string and piano trios, the London premiere of Bryn Harrison’s monumental violin and piano piece ‘Approaching the Receiving Memory’ and a new violin duo by Alex Hills.
Aisha Orazbayeva, Eloisa Fleur Thom violins
Jennifer Ames viola
Anton Lukoszevieze cello
Mark Knoop piano
PROGRAMME:
- Salvatore Sciarrino: ‘Codex Purpureus’ for string trio (1983) 10 min
- Alex Hills: The Chromatic Sedition (2014) for 2 violins 6 min
- Salvatore Sciarrino: Piano Trio no. 2 (1987)15 min
- Bryn Harrison ‘Approaching the Receiving Memory’ for violin and piano (2011/12) 45 min
Salvatore Sciarrino ‘Codex Purpureus'
The case of a work which has been hatched for years - desires suspender for far too long, with incomplete images, yet giving clear outlines, as if their sound was barely an echo.
I would have written many times about that glowing trail, the emission left by sounds throughout the crowded space of the mind: which some mouths call silence. Yet sometimes it is a deeper trace, a crevice. And then all things, the objects which have been expressed, remain as an indefinite emission within the faintest of glows, almost like a streak in memory.
Who will be able to tell when they are once again absorbed within us in the dark?
We tell the difference between vision and blindness in vain: this threshold is crossed dazzling us with all light, with a trail of illusions.
Do you not also hear what is visible inside sound? – Salvatore Sciarrino
Alex Hills ‘Chromatic Sedition’
This is the second work of mine to take inspiration from E.A. Abbott’s wonderful Victorian novel ‘Flatland’. In the book, the Chromatic Sedition was an attack on Flatland’s strict, geometrically derived social hierarchy –the more sides you have, the more important you are – by ‘lesser’ triangles, who painted their simple long sides so they appeared to be many sided polygons. Here, one violin’s uninflected, incredibly limited, music is undermined by the other’s immensely more colored (chromatic in the physical sense) versions of the same basic materials. Chromatic is of course a musical term too, and in that sense here it is the starting point for the uninflected (our ordered world of many sided shapes), and the revolution is its dissolution. – Alex Hills
Salvatore Sciarrino Piano Trio no. 2
To always confront the same enemy. Over many years.I have honed my weapons. The enemy too has become stronger: As I progressed, it followed me silently, step by step.
Now I find the enemy before me once again. Yet, I wish to beat it with other means, and my attack will be different. Other strategies, as the horizon has changed.
The first Trio was from 1975. Its opulence cost plenty of energies, and as a consequence the following seasons were barer. Likewise, and with different results, this one is struggling against an impossibly balanced personnel. Not just as a historical shaper, it picks up its variety and in itself becomes the strong point of every further compositional choice.
Trio n. 2, from 1987, so dry and defiant. It seems to be showing the transformation of figures through the screens of a ghost machine. Something marvelous and altogether mechanical. Even the music, now touched by Proteus, shows its genetic mutations.
The use of computers is not what makes a thing modern. On the contrary: it weakens memory and manages to impair invention. The effort of imagining a result is the earliest offshoot of creativity.
Three were the Charites, children: Melethes, practise; Mneme, remembering; Aoides, singing.
What, therefore, will make us be modern? Sensibility, careful intelligence, an insatiable thirst.
Not the yearning to accomplish, not the moronic ease of printers. – Salvatore Sciarrino
This composition was commissioned by F. van Lanschot Bankiers n.v. in the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the bank's foundation, and performed for the first time at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.
Bryn Harrison ‘Approaching the Receiving Memory’ (2011/2012)
Much of my recent music has been largely concerned with the exploration of musical time through the use of recursive musical forms which challenge our perceptions of time and space by viewing the same material from different angles and perspectives. Receiving the Approaching Memory uses circular patterns that go out of phase with themselves to present a rapidly moving musical continuum that operates largely outside the confines of a more goal-orientated approach to form and structure. Here, near and exact repetition operates in close proximity, providing points of orientation and disorientation for the listener. – Bryn Harrison
Kazakh violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is renowned for her fearless interpretations of contemporary music and radical approach to early repertoire. She has released four critically acclaimed solo albums with music ranging from her own compositions to Telemann and Sciarrino, the New Yorker describing her "Music for VIolin Alone" album as "unanimity of head, heart and hands". She has performed internationally in venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall, HAU2 Berlin, Corum Montpellier for Radio France and Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe. In 2022 together with harpsichordist Prach Boondiskulchok Aisha performed all of Biber's Mystery Sonatas at the Spitalfields Festival in London.
As a composer she has written music for dance, theatre and film, including OUR SOLO a collaboration with ECCE dance company (touring in 2023 - 2024), Heartbreaking Final written with Tim Etchells and commissioned by Wiener Festwochen 2021, the piece was later performed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Aisha is a member of ICTUS ensemble in Brussels.
Eloisa Fleur Thom is a prize-winning violinist in demand throughout the UK both as a soloist and chamber musician. Making her solo debut with orchestra aged 11, Eloisa-Fleur has played in many of the major concert halls in Britain, including concerts in Bridgewater Hall, St Martin-in-the-fields, Wigmore Hall, and Kings Place. Eloisa-Fleur completed her Masters at the Royal Academy of Music in June 2012 after studying with violinist Maurice Hasson. During her time at the Academy she was awarded numerous prizes, including the Edwin Samuel Dove Prize and the Mary Burgess Prize, and was supported by the MBF’s Emily English Award, the Seary Trust, the Countess of Munster and the AHRC. Eloisa-Fleur performed J.S Bach’s Concerto for two violins with Maxim Vengerov at the RAM in November 2012, where she was kindly loaned the 1718 ‘Maurin’ Stradivarius violin.
Eloisa-Fleur is the Artistic Director of The 12 ensemble, an un-conducted string orchestra of a dozen young elite chamber musicians. In 2013, Eloisa-Fleur performed the Kodaly Duo at the Wigmore Hall with partner Max Ruisi on a fine 1709 Tononi kindly lent to her by Lord and Lady Strasburger, and had the pleasure of giving a recital in the Stradivarius exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, playing on a 1714 ‘beech- back’ violin from the Stradivarius collection.
Descended from a retreating Napoleonic soldier and a Lithuanian noblewoman, Anton Lukoszevieze is a cellist, composer, improviser and multidisciplinary artist. He is also the founder and director of the experimental music group Apartment House, releasing over 40 albums with them.
http://www.antonlukoszevieze.co.uk/
London based pianist and conductor Mark Knoop is known for his fearless performances and individual interpretations. He has commissioned and premiered countless new works and worked with many respected composers, and also brings fresh approaches to the standard and 20th- century repertoire. He is currently Turner Sims Fellow at the University of Southampton.
Mark has appeared throughout Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia and in New Zealand, South Korea, Mongolia, United States of America, Canada and at festivals including the Transit, Ultima, Huddersfield, Spitalfields, Borealis, Lucerne, Spor, Melbourne, and Adelaide Festivals, and the ISCM World Music Days.
He performs with such groups as Plus-Minus (London/Brussels), Letter Piece Company (London/Brussels), musikFabrik (Köln) and Apartment House (London). His recordings of music by John Cage, Richard Beaudoin, and David Lumsdaine have been critically acclaimed.
Jennifer is a British violist based in London. Recently graduated from the Royal Academy, Jennifer enjoys a rich and varied musical life. She has worked extensively with the New London Orchestra, Bath Philharmonia, Brandenburg Sinfonia, Orchestra of the Swan and the London Contemporary Orchestra, with whom she recently premiered a new work by Martin Suckling. She is also a member of the newly formed string chamber orchestra the 12 Ensemble, and has performed with them at St James Church, Piccadilly. She is also a member or the Pythagoras Ensemble, a virtuosic string chamber orchestra, with whom she recently had a residency at the Vault Festival in Waterloo.
Recent performances include playing the solo viola part of the film score for ‘Under the Skin’, in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall for the Meltdown Festival. She is also a member of the Deviation String Quartet and an active member of the Re:Sound collective, a group of contemporary music curators and performers.
