Chris Swithinbank

My ar­ti­cle, ‘Into the Lion’s Den: Hel­mut Lachen­mann at 75’, pub­lished in the July issue of Tempo, is now avail­able from Cam­bridge Jour­nals On­line. The piece takes a look at Lachen­mann’s re­cep­tion in the An­glo­phone music world as well as touch­ing on his mu­si­cal and aes­thetic de­vel­op­ment. It is un­for­tu­nately nec­es­sar­ily su­per­fi­cial in some re­spects, but hope­fully will offer a slightly more cur­rent per­spec­tive on the state of re­search into his music and writ­ings than was pre­vi­ously avail­able. Ac­cess to Cam­bridge Jour­nals On­line is re­stricted to those with sub­scrip­tions or in­sti­tu­tional mem­ber­ships, so if any­one is in­ter­ested and can’t ac­cess the ar­ti­cle this way, please get in touch.

Pre­vi­ously: A Struc­ture of Phys­i­cal­i­ties: Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s temA • The In­ward Beauty of Hel­mut Lachen­mann • Hel­mut Lachen­mann in Stuttgart, 13.02.2009

This evening, Small Atlas will be pre­miered at the Ar­se­nal in Metz, France, by Mario Car­oli, Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, Do­na­ti­enne Michel-Dansac and Vin­cent Leterme. This fan­tas­tic quar­tet of mu­si­cians (pic­tured below) has been ex­cel­lent to work with so far and I look for­ward to hear­ing the piece take shape in per­for­mance.

For those not in Metz, here is a flavour of what’s in store from the record­ing made dur­ing our work­shop-re­hearsal yes­ter­day:

I’m in Metz, France, for two weeks for the Cen­tre Acan­thes se­ries of work­shops and lec­tures, which will in­clude work­shops of my new piece for flute, so­prano sax­o­phone, voice and piano, Small Atlas, the first of which is to­mor­row morn­ing. The play­ers are Mario Car­oli (flute), Pierre-Stéphane Meugé (sax­o­phone), Do­na­ti­enne Michel-Dansac (voice) and Vin­cent Leterme (piano). Unsuk Chin, Philippe Hurel and Oscar Strasnoy are on the com­po­si­tion fac­ulty, while Mario Car­oli and An­drew Zolin­sky are giv­ing flute and piano mas­ter­classes re­spec­tively. Tonight, Alexan­dre Tha­raud gives a piano recital of works by Domenico Scar­latti, Thierry Pécou, Oscar Strasnoy, Gérard Pes­son and Mauri­cio Kagel.

My stay in Metz is sup­ported by a bur­sary from ADAMI and SACEM.

Two weeks ago King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety pre­miered my or­ches­tral piece, June Un­fold­ing, writ­ten for the oc­ca­sion — a spe­cial con­cert mark­ing the 750th an­niver­sary of Mac­cles­field’s Royal Char­ter. The re­sult was recorded by BBC Radio 3 and will be broad­cast later this year, but in the mean­time, here is a short ex­cerpt from the first half of the piece (which is around 12 min­utes long in total) from a ‘boot­leg’ record­ing by a friend. While lis­ten­ing, get a feel for the con­cert’s sights with pho­tos taken by Gareth Hack­ing on the night, some of which I’ve also in­cluded below. Thanks again to every­one in­volved in mak­ing the night such a great suc­cess, from mu­si­cians to fire stew­ards.