Days out at Presteigne

I’ve just come back from the Presteigne Festival which I’ve been reviewing for the Western Mail and Hereford Times.

It’s a great little town on the Welsh border – rather like stepping back forty years in time (try linking up to Wi-fi there…).

These days the festival is very much a contemporary music event. It could easily spell disaster at the box office, but the concerts and talks have been packed out with enthusiastic, appreciative audiences, with the normally sleepy little border town bustling with activity well into the small hours (a special pop-up festival bar in someone’s house might have something to do with it). Here is St Andrew’s Church where many of the events are held.

This year there was a special focus on recent Polish music. Here’s Pawveł Łukaszewski whose impressive 55 minute Requiem caused quite a lot of controversy.

Below is a link to my review in the Western Mail. There are a couple of short reviews still to come in the Hereford Times.

Western Mail

www.presteignefestival.com

Bayvil

I have been revising a piano piece for its second performance this autumn. It’s called Bayvil – the same name as the small Anglican chapel of St Andrews, near Newport in Pembrokeshire, built around 1812. The name seems to come from Norman-French Beauvil, a "pleasant settlement".

It’s a wonderful example of an unaltered rural church of two hundred years ago.

As you can see, its simple plastered walls, slate floors, box pews, three-decker pulpit and flagstones hardly seem to have changed since it was built.

It has been a redundant church for some years and is under the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches. From its door the sea in Newport Bay is visible.

As with several other recent pieces, this eight-minute piano solo reflects the plain unadorned flat surface of its interior. You can hear it here. Here are a couple of pages from the score. 

www.friendsoffriendlesschurches.org.uk

Flute, Festival, Fishguard

I’ve been at the Fishguard Festival in Pembrokeshire soaking up the sun.

The wonderful La Mer Trio were there on Monday night. The ensemble consists of flute, viola and harp – a transparent and luminous sound, perfect for the cool space of St Mary’s Church in the town centre.

Here they are in rehearsal for a concert of music by Debussy, Ravel, Bax, Mathias, Telemann and a super new piece by Mervyn Burtch – and they also did a great job on my piece Beiliheulog (this is a version of the same piece that I wrote for flute, viola and guitar - see http://petereynoldscomposer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/song-for-hidden-chapel.html for more details).

And here they are in full concert gear.

Many thanks to Renate, Maja and Hannah for a beautifully controlled and elegant performance and also to Gillian, Gaye and Geraint for all their support and hospitality.

The festival runs until 30 July – details below.

 www.fishguardmusicfestival.co.uk

www.lamertrio.com

Young Composers at Rhosygilwen

Last night was the final concert in this year’s Young Composer of Dyfed at the wonderful Rhosygilwen Arts Centre near Cardigan.

Young Composer of Dyfed is one of the great undiscovered secrets of Wales – a scheme in which young composers in Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokshire work with top, often international, quality players. This year they were working with the Galliard Wind Quintet. After workshops delivered to some 500 school pupils back in September, the young composers worked with composer Lynne Plowman (below) on their compositions through from October to January. The whole scheme is organised by the super efficient Cathy Morris and was compared by Lynne and Emyr Wynne Jones, Music Adviser at Carmarthenshire Schools (right), who has given the scheme endless support over its twelve years or so. I'm particularly attached to the scheme and was honoured to be their Composer in Residence between 2010-13. 

Over the last week, the Galliard Quintet have premiered 34 brand new pieces by young composers from Dyfed. Last night, looking suspiciously fresh, they played fifteen of them. The choice of the pieces was made by composer Gabriel Jackson. Here are the Galliards, about to perform …

… and here they are with the fifteen composers at the end of the evening. Absolutely fabulous!

ymmd.org.uk/en/dyfed-young-composers

www.lynneplowman.co.uk

Footsteps in the can

I’ve just had a fantastic day down at Tŷ Cerdd’s recording studio at Wales Millennium Centre with the Mavron String Quartet and Francesca Kay recording my quartet, footsteps quiet in the shadows, for a CD.

Although the quartet is only just over twelve minutes, we had four hours of recording time booked so that we could get every aspect of it right. And we still have the editing session yet to come … We had Ty Cerdd’s engineer, James Clark at the control desk guiding us smoothly through the day.

The Mavrons have given eight public performances of the quartet and really have it under their belts. Last week I spent a very long day finishing a final copy of the score and it was useful to copy it out again to familiarise myself with all its details. Here’s a photo of pages from the last movement – although I can use music software, I dislike it and prefer to make my scores by hand.

It was great to have Francesca Kay in the recording studio with us. The piece takes its title from a poem called Unicorn by Francesca from her collection Mythical Beasts. She’s been able to read it at most of the performances, and the transition from her reading into the opening bars is a magical moment which we all now regard as an integral part of the piece. Here she is today reading it in the studio.

Look out for news of the CD itself.

Many thanks to Chrissie, Katie, Niamh, Bea, Francesca, James and Jim for all their work today. 

www.mavronquartet.co.uk

www.francescakay.co.uk

www.tycerdd.org

Windows

I’ve been looking through recent photos and see I've developed an interest in windows. I like the way in which they provide a frame for a picture, such as this one below taken on a misty day at Chepstow Castle.

I also like the way that they can become gleaming objects in a dark space. Here’s one taken just before sunrise Patrishow Church in the Black Mountains.

By comparison here is one taken at sunset last weekend in the tiny little Shropshire church of Melverley – a wonderful fifteenth century timber-framed church next to the River Vyrnwy.

Here’s another taken at the Church of St Cross in Winchester where looking out from the cloister.

This comes from  the most remote chapel in Wales, Soar-y-mynydd, on the road from Tregaron to Llyn Brianne.

I’m not quite sure how they all add up at the moment, but think that something will come out of them.

Textiles and Music in Shropshire

I was in Wem, Shropshire, on Saturday night to review a premiere by the composer Howard Skempton given by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group at the wonderfully refurbished Edwardian town hall.

I’m a huge admirer of Skempton’s sparse and understated scores and was particularly interested in this new piece, Field Notes, because it’s a collaboration with textile artist Matthew Harris. They’ve used old maps of Shropshire and graphic scores as common starting points, and Harris’s freestanding artwork, combining textiles and drawings, framed the performance space where four players from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group played the new piece.

During the concert, Matthew Harris’s textiles and his and Skempton’s sketches were laid out for the audience to view during the evening. Consisting of twelve folded fragments, his textiles reflect both the graphic nature of the ancient maps (a historic record of “carving and cutting up of land where fields become fragments”) with their different shades of pale yellow whilst their free-flowing shapes are unconstrained by the usual squares and rectangles; like Skempton’s music, the result is open-ended. 

There is a fascinating website and blog that records the creative process that the project moved through http://fieldnotestour.co.uk/

Wem is a wonderful little village and a great place to come for a premiere.

http://www.wemtownhall.co.uk/