Monday 3 April 2017, 7.30pm
Nominated in 2014 for a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, Simon Vincent is a performer and composer of acoustic and electronic music, who has been challenging the boundaries of genre and musical expression with a highly personal language since the early 1990’s.
This evening’s concert is the first in a series, organised with support from Arts Council England, entitled Stations of the Cross in which Simon will be presenting recent compositions for solo piano, as well a new CD released on Vision Of Sound Records.
In the first half of the concert Simon will perform Stations of the Cross (2016), a new work for solo piano depicting the process of Christ’s spiritual and corporeal journey as well as the political relationship of the individual to both a society and a state which are not only capable of looking away but also of inflicting and allowing suffering, themes which are or vital importance to us today.
The second half will feature a recent commission for piano and electronics entitled La Mia Coppa Trabocca (2016), whose central theme is water. After a dense, cluster-based ‘ouverture’, the work gives way to small, self-contained movements which – for both performer and audience alike – create a highly focused atmosphere of temporal expansion, culminating in a moment of clarification in the piece’s final movement.
The audience is warmly invited to discuss these works after the concert.
Simon’s music, described as “visionary and expressive”, “rich and surprising”, “exquisite”, “mesmerising”, “transcendental, yet unshakably earthbound”, “masterful”, “Debussy-like”, has attracted praise and radio play from critics as varied as Ben Watson, Julian Cowley, Nick Luscombe, Massimo Ricci, Gilles Peterson, Mr. Scruff, and has been reviewed internationally in many publications including The Wire, De:Bug, Knowledge Magazine, Jazz and Beyond, Extranormal and Straight No Chaser.
Releasing works on Erstwhile Records, EMANEM, L’innomable, Edition DEGEM, as well as his own label Vision of Sound, Simon’s unique work has led to appearances at the Glastonbury Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Akademie der Künste (Berlin), ICA London, Club Transmediale (Berlin), National Museum (Stockholm), Progression Sessions (London), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt), Q-02 (Brussels), Visiones Sonoras (Mexico City), as well as on Resonance FM, Ministry of Sound Radio, and FM4-Austria among many others.
3 new electroacoustic compositions for London-based RPO trombonist Matthew Gee will be released later this year and a new work-in-progress for piano and electronics will be premiered by Swedish pianist Jesper Olsson in 2018.
