Norman Borders

I'm very lucky to have had two carefully prepared performances this weekend of a new piece given by Borders Trio. The piece, Le Gros Horlage, for clarinet, violin and piano, is based on the chimes of the Great Clock in Rouen, France – an astronomic clock dating back to 1527 and earlier. 

When Anna Perry, clarinetist with the group, asked me to write the piece earlier this year, I remembered I had jotted down the clock's chimes when I was last in Rouen. At the time I was enjoying a glass of wine on the terrace just under the clock and when the chimes sounded I was intrigued by the way they outlined a key without ever sounding the actual tonic (keynote). I jotted them down on the other side of a receipt for the wine I was drinking and only came back to it earlier this year when I was thinking about the trio.

The first performances were given at Ledbury's Market Theatre (a very nice venue for young chamber groups) on Saturday and then at Cardiff's St Teilo's Church this afternoon by clarinetist Anna Perry, violinist David Grubb and pianists Jess Ryan-Phillips. 

 

Borders Trio are a very enterprising group and five of the seven pieces in their concert were written especially for them. These included some wonderfully inventive and varied works from Alison Doubleday, Karim Bedda, Richard Jackson and Rosemary Kempson. The final result is a short four-minute piece extending the chimes into a longer melodic line. The trio have a number of extended effects to play: Anna made her debut playing claves last night, David has several passages on the other side of the violin bridge and Jess has some inside-the-piano work to do (Alas, we only had an electric instrument, but Jess worked miracles...)

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It's a long time since I wrote the chimes down, so I hope that they are an accurate representation of what I heard on that August day back in 2002 ...

Dyfed Young Composers

I've been down in West Wales for several days taking part in workshops to encourage school age students to compose. The scheme is run by Dyfed Young Composers – a scheme in which young composers in Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokshire work with top quality players. This year they will be working with violinist Steve Bingham and percussionist Chris Brannick. Last week was the start of the process with three workshops to some 300 school pupils given in Haverfordwest, Aberaeron and Gwendraith. I was honoured to be their Composer in Residence between 2010-13 and am very happy to be back again this year. 

Young composers are being invited to compose for violin and percussion and to include electric violin as well together with electronics. Here is Steve Bingham playing on an instrument that is over 200 years old ... 

... and a bright blue new electric violin.

Steve Brannick was unable to join us for the first week of workshops, so it was great to have Steffan Ciccotti on hand to take everyone through the inticacies of writing for percussion. Steffan was both a finalist in the Young Music Makers of Dyfed competition and wrote pieces under the Dyfed Young Composers scheme some years back and is now working as a freelance composer and percussionist in London. It's great news that both he and composer Emily Wright will be coming into the schools to help me ...

You can find out more about the scheme at its website. If you were born in any of the counties of Dyfed and are 22 or under you can also take part or submit a composition for the workshops next April. Many thanks to YMMD's administrator Cathy Morris for the photos.

Love from Latvia

Latvia's leading composer Pēteris Vasks has been in Cardiff for the last week for a large 70th birthday retrospective of his work at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival. Last night's concert at All Saints' Church in Penarth was devoted to a searing performance of his Piano Quartet by Ensemble MidVest (from Denmark) and also marked John Metcalf's (the festival's artistic director)  forthcoming 70th birthday with incandescent performances of three of his works (the finest performances of them I've heard). Here they both are cutting a birthday cake after the performance. 

I remember first hearing his music back in 1996 when the whole festival was devoted to music from the Baltic States (the first major exposure to this then unknown music in Britain). It was already a hugely rich selection of fantastic new pieces, but the one piece that absolutely blew me away was Vasks’s Symphony for Strings, Stimmen. Twenty years later there's a richer legacy of work. On the first night of the festival (10 May) I was lucky to be able to interview him (with our wonderful interpreter Andy Taurins) and hear about the constraints under which he worked as a composer until well into his forties under the Soviet Regime. 

Before the Second World War, Latvia, rather like Wales, had only a limited tradition of composition. From the 1940s until Perestroika, their composers had limited access to developments in the west and laboured under Soviet political pressure. They had to invent for themselves a recognizable national musical voice and probably, beyond developments in Poland, had little access to the west. Yesterday morning Vasks gave a fascinating interview for the composition students at Cardiff University where he talked about only being able to access new music occasionally via Radio Vienna. What comes through his music and from the man himself is a huge generosity of spirit. For students more used to listening to lectures about row rotations, hearing a composer declare that the most important thing in his music was love was probably quite a new experience. 

John Kehoe's description of his music written now about twenty years ago still sums up his approach: "Vasks will frequently abandon technical explanations in favour of nature imagery, the grandeur of a mighty forest, the free flight of birds and their song. These are matters very close to his heart, and of these things, or rather of their spirit, his music speaks." 

Vasks's new Viola Concerto was premiered at BBC Hoddinott Hall tomorrow night by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (20 May at 7.30pm);I interviewed him and the soloist, Maxim Rysanov.. 

You can see more details of this year's Vale of Glamorgan Festival here. 

Fighter for the cause of music

Today marks the anniversary of the death of composer David Lloyd-Howells who died in Abergavenny, Wales, on 14 May 2015. I'd known him since 1977 when we both started as undergraduates at the Music Department at Cardiff University. David was an original and a bit intimidating to other undergrads with his intense engagement with music; he was already thirty-five years old and ravenous to learn. At the time I knew he was a composer; now I know that he was a composer with an already highly developed technique who wrote some of his best and most ambitious pieces during that period (around 1977-82).  

David usually showed up to lectures in a suit and bow tie (rather like the picture above) and engaged with music with terrific intensity. A coffee-break at college might typically open with something along the lines of: "The question is, not, 'what is music?' but, 'why is music?' It was easy to send him up; we also didn't understand or know how he had secured a musical education against all odds, traveling through the USA and Canada in the early 1960s in the process. Here are a couple of photos taken at that time.

And that background didn't equip him for dealing with the politics of negotiating a career in music. He  didn't stroke egos and when things didn't happen or go right, he said what he thought. But what he said was born out of a passionate belief in his art and a frustration if his work didn't bear fruit. And he worked at composition with an intensity that would put most of us to shame. Here he is at a party I gave in January 1983, in characteristic full flow.

One of the pieces I still think is his most impressive is one I had many hours of fascinating discussions about  around 1982 at the time he was writing it. Choirs and Dialogues for 15 solo strings was the last of his pieces written in (more or less) conventional notation - a work of great complexity lasting some 50 minutes or so and perhaps his finest achievement. After this point David decided that the future lay in music technology and gradually built up his own personal studio. These days when access to technology is so much easier, it's difficult to imagine the leap for someone to stop composing and put aside for nearly five years in order to learn and acquire the necessary equipment and training.  

He was hard to deal with. His devotion to what he did and single-mindedness meant that there was never any small talk. Everything was pitched at the highest level. Alas, the attention to detail he applied to his musical texts was not reflected in his literary efforts, letters to papers and individuals (which, unfortunately, was mainly most that the music profession knew of him).

At the time of his death he had been engaged on writing an opera about the 1966 Aberfan disaster which would have been scored for singers with a complex electronic soundscape. He never got to the point of pulling it all together and it now exists in many box files of sketches and various soundfiles. This summer I will be sending his manuscripts and electronic material to the National Library of Wales who have agreed to take the estate. His not inconsiderable electronic studio is now housed in the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff where a new generation of students use it.

I've set up a Soundloud page where recordings will be posted - do listen to the wonderful 2nd Piano Sonata in a BBC recording made by Martin Jones in 1980. https://soundcloud.com/david-lloyd-howells

For more details of David Lloyd-Howells's work, email Peter Reynolds at David.Lloyd.Howells.Music@gmail.com
There is also a page devoted to his music at Musicweb International

THREE

It's been a weekend of contemporary music at St David's Hall, Cardiff. On Saturday lunchtime, the last of this season's series of lunchtime contemporary concerts was given by Cardiff's own Arcomis Ensemble, featuring the fabulous violinist Rhys Watkins. Preparations for the next season's series is now in full swing.

On Sunday afternoon, St David's Hall and the Welsh National Opera Orchestra launched their ambitious THREE concert - three premieres of newly commissioned works by living composers presented in one concert. The project was already well-advanced when I joined the Hall as its Classical Music Adviser at the end of 2014, but it has been fascinating to see how it evolved. 

The performances represent three very different kinds of new music. The opening piece, Mametz Wood, was by Gareth Glyn, though, in his words, he didn't compose a note of it. The work was a collaboration between him and pupils from Michaelson Community College, Corpus Christi High School and Radyr Comprehensive. Under the guidance of composers Helen Woods and James Williams, the pupils created a range of 'raw' musical ideas that were then woven by Gareth into a deft and and very effective orchestral work. The inspiration for the ideas came from a painting by Christopher Wood (1873-1934) in the National Gallery of Wales, The Welsh at Mametz Wood, based on the First World War incident during the battle of the Somme. 

This then moved on to a commission from Welsh composer Pwyll ap Siôn: a series of four songs, Chaotic Angels, for soprano and orchestra setting poems by Gwyneth Lewis, one of Wales’s most respected poets.  I've followed Pwyll's music since first hearing it at an SPNM concert at Bangor University where we were both having works performed back in 1991, but these songs were the most impressive work I have heard from his pen: a wonderful clarity and response to the powerful words, sung here by young Welsh soprano Céline Forrest (photo below from yesterday's performance). 

The commission came around because, back in 1997, as a very young composer, Pwyll had been commissioned to write a song cycle for the Welsh Proms which, for various reasons, had not been performed at the time. We initially had the idea of giving the piece a belated performance, but Pwyll, like most composers, was more interested in composing a new work. 

Finally, for the third work, St David’s Hall was one of four international co-commissioners for the Babylon-Suite by one of the most critically acclaimed German composers of his generation, Jörg Widmann. 

The suite is drawn from one of the most ambitious and lavish operatic premieres of the last few years (you can see an extract here). a real tour de force in its virtuosic use of the modern symphony orchestra with around 100 performers on the stage (St David's Hall had to bring out its rarely used second stage extension). If you're not already familar with Widmann's music, then Tom Service's profile here is a good introduction. The Welsh National Opera Orchestra were on top form, conducted by Lothar Koenigs, giving his final performance as Music Director of WNO (and Simon Phillippo - below - in Gareth Glyn's piece). 
  

You can read Philip May's review for Bachtrack here.

59 Pieces of Music in Four Days

Today is my final day at the 2016 ISCM Music Days in Tongyeong in South Korea. The cherry blossom is in full bloom, but the view of the islands over the peninsula is misty and evocative.

By my calculation, I've heard 59 individual pieces of contemporary music whilst here from over fifty different countries. Some of the most interesting have come from Asian composers, using the tools of the western tradition, but from a new and fascinating perspective. I would have lost track altogether of the various pieces, had I not kept notes. At one of the assembly meetings it was suggested that each of us nominate half a dozen pieces that we were particularly struck by - here are a few of the names and pieces that have stood out for me this week. Click on the composers' names to reach their website.

One of the most evocative pieces, filled with delicate colours was Midsummer Song by Lithuanian composers Raminta Šerkšnytė (b.1975) played by the strings of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (30 March). 

From Britain came a virtuoso choral work by the young composer Alexander Campkin (b.1984), Unleash the beauty of your eyes sung by the Incheon City Chorale (28 March). 

Finnish-born Jouni Hirvelä came up with a fabulous orchestral piece Vuolle based on "the movement of gliding water masses of the Kymi River in South East Finland" - a magical piece of orchestral textures played by Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa (28 March).

Rita Ueda's As snowflakes return to the sky was one of Canada's entries. Scored for string ensemble, it's a mesmerising piece whose quietly repetitive rhythms produce a wonderfully meditative effect (29 March - Hong Kong New Music Ensemble). 

In terms of sheer beauty and mastery if orchestral texture, there wasn't much this week to match Isao Matsushita's Prayer of the Firmament - written in response to the nuclear disaster on 11 March 2011 (Changwon Philharmonic Orchestra, 29 March). 

Orchestra mastery of a different kind came in Elzbieta Sikora's Five Miniatures for Orchestra - a work displaying the passion of youth and mastery of a lifetime (31 March, Gyeonggi Philharmonic Orchestra)

Then, finally, there was Francisco del Pino's Largrimas for solo cello - elegant, utterly new but highly expressive (Ensemble TMIF, 30 March).   

Cherry Blossom arrives in Tongyeong

Yesterday, overnight all the trees in Tongyeong, South Korea, suddenly exploded in a riot of cherry blossom - by the time I arrive back in Cardiff on Friday evening, it will have gone.

Here is a short haiku by Issa from 1804

cherry blossoms
tree after tree
of good karma

And here is the view from Tongyeong's concert hall

To read other blogs on the ISCM Music Days in Tongyeong see here and here.

New Music in Tongyeong

After 26 hours of travelling, I've arrived in Tongyeong, South Korea, where I'm delighted to be representing Wales as a delegate at this year’s ISCM World Music Days. The International Society for Contemporary Music held their first annual World Music Days back in 1923 and each year presents music from over fifty different countries. Last year Wales became the latest country to join and will have its music represented at the days from 2018 onwards. I'm here attending the conference and concerts at this year’s music days in the coastal city of Tongyeong on the southern tip of the Goseong Peninsula. 

Before the opening reception at the city's concert hall, I had a chance to spend a day in the brilliant Easter Sunday sunshine visiting the seaport city itself. Down in the harbour there's no doubt that this is a fishing town.

Here's the entrance to the fish market where people sell fish traditionally as they probably have here for hundreds of years.

Korea is very modern - on a two hour car journey to get here I did not see any building that looked more than fifty years old. It is full of bright primary colours, the landscape scorched and, on the southern peninsula at least, the cities and towns surrounded by mountains that remind one strongly of Hokusai. But in Tongyeong, despite its size (the population is 120,000), there is not one apartment store and virtually no international chain stores (apparently they had two Starbucks, but one has just closed). Instead it is riot of small little shops with bright eye-catching signage.

Unlike Britain where one would never know that a contemporary music festival was happening (because signs and banners cost so much), here there are signs and banner everywhere proclaiming the Sounds of Tomorrow Festival. 

At 5pm there was a reception at the concert hall here with about a hundred composers squeezed into a small room where Philip Glass made a speech and Unsuk Chin arrived for the festival. Take a look at the photos on the ISCM's Facebook page. Tomorrow my work as a delegate begins - fourteen hours of meetings and concerts with over 50 pieces of contemporary music.

You can find out more about the ISCM here and more details of this year’s festival here. Look out for more details of the visit over the next few days.