Tagged with 'Royal Albert Hall'

Summer, sun, symphony concert: The Bayreuth Festival invites everyone to the open-air concert ‘Wagner for all’ with a picnic on 30 July. With free admission, the festival orchestra under the direction of Nathalie Stutzmann will present musical and spatial references to Wagner, including Anton Bruckner's 7th Symphony. 

Ryan Wigglesworth will make no fewer than three appearances as a conductor at this year’s BBC Proms, including on 28 August 2019 when he will direct the world premiere of his Piano Concerto with Marc-André Hamelin and Britten Sinfonia. The new work is the result of a joint commission between BBC Radio 3 and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.



From the chorale figures of its opening arioso, to the contrapuntal scherzo and trio and the fugal finale, Wigglesworth’s Piano Concerto is characterised by its incorporation of Classical form and stylistic elements into his own contemporary idiom.

The solo piano part, neither bravura nor particularly virtuosic, often displays a poetic, intimate character. The work’s four movements are studies in character. The first, songlike; the second, a fast scherzo with a gentler central trio; the third, a nocturne based on a folk melody; and finally, a lively contrapuntal Gigue. - Ryan Wigglesworth

The lightly scored Notturno is one of the work’s more intimate moments. The orchestra is reduced to just strings and harp, accompanying the soloist in a small set of variations based on a Polish folk song Wigglesworth first heard around a campfire. His personal association of the melody with night is rendered in the dream-like and occasionally nightmarish quality of this movement.

Ryan Wigglesworth: Piano Concerto – Incorporation of classical form in a contemporary idiom

Audiences will be able to hear Wiggleworth’s Piano Concerto in performances around the world in coming seasons, including on 27, 28 and 29 February 2020 with Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

 

• Ryan Wigglesworth - profile


• Piano Concerto - work details


• BBC Proms

 

Photo: Benjamin Ealovega

On 8 August 2019, BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales conducted by Tadaaki Otaka will give the world premiere of Huw Watkins’ new work The Moon at the BBC Proms. The work, which has been inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing on 20 July 1969, is the result of a major BBC Radio 3 commission for chorus and orchestra that will be further augmented by the Royal Albert Hall’s organ.

The piece tries to capture our experience of viewing the moon from Earth, and is also somehow about looking back at us here on Earth from above. – Huw Watkins

Rather than dealing with the moon landing directly, Watkins’ new work instead explores the collective experience of wonder, and sometimes unease, associated with the moon and space. The Moon is composed in a single movement spanning twenty minutes during which listeners are guiding through their journey by settings of poetry by Percy B. Shelley, Philip Larkin and Walt Whitman.

Huw Watkins: The Moon - Inspired by the moon landing

The Moon is Watkins’ third work composed for BBC NOW as Composer in Association with the orchestra. During his tenure, the orchestra has given performances of many of his existing orchestral and chamber works, as well as premiered the Cello Concerto (2016), written for his brother Paul Watkins and first performed at the BBC Proms under Thomas Søndergård, and Spring (2017) for orchestra.

 

• Huw Watkins - profile


• The Moon - work details


• BBC Proms

 

Photo: © B Ealovega

Ludwig van Beethoven and Canada. What do those two have in common?

Gerald Barry’s new work for voice and orchestra, Canada, will have its world premiere at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms on 21 August.



Specially commissioned for the Proms, it will be performed by tenor Allan Clayton and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.

"Some time ago I was in Toronto airport returning to Dublin. When I got through security, Canada suddenly came into my head: a setting of the Fidelio Prisoners' Chorus for voice and orchestra." Gerald Barry

Gerald Barrys Canada – A tribute to Beethoven

The text, in English, French and German, includes the lines "Speak softly! We are watched with eyes and ears" from Beethoven’s politically charged and only opera, Fidelio. Barry holds Beethoven in high regard, considering him to be the greatest composer that ever lived. Many of his own works draw on the letters and works of Beethoven.  These include Schott and Sons, Mainz for bass solo and SATB choir which uses selected texts from Beethoven’s letters to his publisher and Beethoven for bass voice and ensemble which also features excerpts from Beethoven’s personal letters to his "Immortal Beloved".

“Canada, the name and country, is both everyday and strange to me - exotically normal.” Gerald Barry

Other new works for Barry this season include an Organ Concerto for organist Thomas Trotter commissioned jointly by Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.

Beethoven would celebrate his 250. birthday in 2020. If you’re still looking for suitable musical programme, you’re invited to have a look at the recent Schott journal for inspiration.

• Gerald Barry - profile


• Canada - work details


• BBC Proms

The Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle will give two national premieres of Julian Anderson's new orchestral work Incantesimi this week at the Lucerne Festival on Wednesday 31 August and at the BBC Proms on Saturday 3 September.



Written with this orchestra's particular colour in mind, Incantesimi is an 8-minute glittering exploration of orbiting musical ideas. Following its world premiere in Berlin in June, the Berlin Philharmonic have taken the piece on tour to Rotterdam, Lucerne, and culminating with the UK premiere at the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Incantesimi (meaning ‘spells’ or ‘enchantments’ in Italian) is based on five musical ideas which circle around each other, sometimes accompanying in the background, sometimes rising to the foreground. The work is characterised by a recurring Cor Anglais solo, a long arching string figure, low chords, and bell chords in the middle and high registers. The piece unfolds slowly in what the composer describes as an “almost hypnotic state”, which lends the work its title. Toward the end of the work, the tempo dramatically shifts, bringing about an eruption of sound. This subsides and the music continues its orbit to close the piece.

When Sir Simon Rattle asked me to compose a work for the Berlin Philharmonic, I decided to write a piece which focused upon line and timbre unfolding at a slow rate. I have always admired the ability of Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic to play long, flowing musical lines with exceptional beauty of tone. – Julian Anderson

A co-commission between the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, the Royal Philharmonic Society and Boston Symphony Orchestra, Incantesimi will be given its US premiere by the BSO on 26 January 2017 followed by performances on 27 and 28 January at Symphony Hall, Boston, Massachusetts.

• Julian Anderson - profile


• Incantesimi - workdetails

This year's BBC Proms will include a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) on 8 August. Simon Russell Beale will narrate, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices.



In 1933, Schoenberg, the son of a Jewish merchant, fled the Nazi party’s rise to power and emigrated to the USA. The Nazi dictatorship and subsequent Holocaust clearly impacted Schoenberg deeply, driving and intensifying the representation of human suffering and torment in his compositions, as evident in A Survivor from Warsaw .

A Survivor from Warsaw - A groundbreaking exploration of twelve-tone technique

In just 8 minutes, Schoenberg expresses musically the suffering and persecution of an entire population. The cantata text, written by Schoenberg himself, portrays a scene in the Warsaw Ghetto to illustrate experiencing the Nazi reign of terror. The cantata is in three different languages: The narrator speaks English, but quotes the commanding shouts of a soldier in German, and finally in a devastating emotional climax to the work, the narrator cries out in Hebrew ‘Shema Yisroel’, a Jewish declaration of faith.

Now, what the text of the Survivor means to me: it means at first a warning never to forget what has been done to us, never to forget that even people who did not do it themselves, agreed and found it necessary to treat us this way. We should never forget this, even if such things have not been done in the manner in which I describe in the ‘Survivor’. This does not matter. The main thing is that I saw it in my imagination. – Arnold Schönberg

Other Schott works at the BBC Proms include Henri Dutilleux’s The Shadows of Time (1997) on 8 August in the same programme as A Survivor from Warsaw, Sir Charles his Pavan (1992) by the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies performed by Juanjo Mena and the BBC Philharmonic on 9 August and a new Cello Concerto by Huw Watkins will receive its world premiere with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Thomas Søndergård and with the composer’s brother Paul Watkins as soloist on 12 August.

• Arnold Schönberg - profile


• A Survivor from Warsaw - workdetails