Fantastic violist Emma Richards will be performing my short piece Gaza Cantos at a lunchtime concert on Thursday 30 September as part of Hexham Abbey Festival of Music & Arts. The programme also includes Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder, Johannes Brahms’s F minor Sonata and movements from a transcription of the first Bach cello suite.
La leggerezza delle città, which was premièred two weeks ago at Encuentros Cuenca, is now available over on Bandcamp for streaming and download. Below is a photo from before the concert in Cuenca in the cloister of art gallery and ex-convent, the Fundación Antonio Pérez. The view was spectacular and as the sounds of the tape music seemed to creep in from the narrow streets and burst from the valley below the experience of the music was very vivid.
Concert space at Encuentros Cuenca: the cloister of Fundación Antonio Pérez
I will be performing/appearing/being at A Curious Night at the Nip & Tipple in Whalley Range the evening of Monday 13th September. Put together by composer Nina Whiteman and performance artist Michael Mayhew, it will include an eclectic range of performances, happenings and a ‘curious vegetable competition’, spurred on by Nabokov’s suggestion that ‘curiosity is insubordination in its purest form’. My contributions will include an audience improvisation piece with electronic atmosphere, titled Quiet Games, and an improvised performance on the cello. Come along, it should be intriguing.
I have arrived home from a wonderful trip to premiere my tape piece La leggerezza delle città at Encuentros Cuenca. The festival was fantastic, the dance in particular standing out, and the cloister of the Fundación Antonio Pérez with a view across the valley proved a beautiful setting for the concert of electroacoustic music, which also included music by Donal Sarsfield, Panos Amelides, Irma Catalina Álvarez and Ricardo Climent. Many thanks to all the Encuentros Cuenca team. It was great to meet them all!
I was snapped diffusing during the concert by the local newspaper, El Día:
Two of my tape pieces Para cruzar el sueño and the brand-new La leggerezza delle città will be performed on the 4th of September at the Encuentros Cuenca festival in Spain. I’m very grateful to Irma Catalina Álvarez and the rest of the festival organisers for commissioning La leggerezza delle città and flying me over to see the marvellous festival for myself. I can’t wait. Fellow adoptive Mancunians, Panos Amelides and Donal Sarsfield, are also having works premiered at Encuentros and University of Manchester lecturer Ricardo Climent features in the concert of electroacoustic music as well. The festival also includes performances of experimental dance and theatre, with all the events taking place at the Fundación Antonio Pérez, a gallery of contemporary art.