Louis Andriessen
Zilver
The idea behind Zilver was to write a chorale variation as Bach did for organ: a long, slow-moving melody, combined with the same melody played faster. The ensemble is divided into two groups: the wind and strings play the sustained melody in chorale-like four-part harmony, and the rest of the instruments – vibraphone, marimba and piano – play increasingly fast staccato chords. The two groups play in canons.
Zilver is one of a planned series of chamber pieces named after a type of physical matter. Hout (‘wood’) is the first, and Zilver (‘silver’) is the second. The title also refers to the two silver instruments – flute and vibraphone – which start and end the piece.
Written by Louis Andriessen
Carmel Smickersgill
Brute (consortium commission with BCMG, Die Neue Ensemble, Hannover, FontanaMIX (Bologna) funded by Siemens Foundation, Liverpool premiere)
When I started writing this piece, I was looking at the world that I was living in. I think most of us are living in a quite computer-based and quite virtual world, which has this weird detachment. I looked at how people maliciously interact with that, the idea of different ways that people get hacked and different methods people use to invade your life via a device.
The piece is called Brute because I was looking at this method of hacking people called a ‘brute force attack’. This is where you try as many passwords as you can until you guess someone’s password correctly. Then you have access to their life, their social media, their email account. It’s the weird combination of being so invasive but also none of it is real. Someone has not stolen your bag, instead it doesn’t exist in a real-world sense.
Carmel Smickersgill, speaking in an interview with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
Tansy Davies
Glider (bonne clarinette) (world premiere, co-commissioned with Helen and David Thomas and University of Liverpool)
Tansy Davies’ title for the piece, Glider, comes from a moment when, walking in the Pyrenees, she saw a glider high in the sky, in the heavens. The contrast between the earth and the heavens provides an elemental background to this short ‘song of the mountain’ with its raw lyrical qualities. Tansy says: “The featured bass clarinet is a pure earthy spiritual being, playing to the heavens. He’s a singer in a way, something ancient about his voice, other worldly.” Tansy also says that stylistically the piece itself exhibits a huge contrast - “a weird interaction between a quasi minimalist and quasi spectralist language.”
The subtitle for the piece, Bonne Clarinette, comes from a rather different story. Conductor Clark Rundell relates: “The subtitle comes from the rather tense, but hilarious in retrospect, journey through the French border in deepest Covid lockdown in February 2020. After much reading of documents, and questioning about the purpose of this visit of two musicians, the official FINALLY stamped our passports with a simple ‘Here you go, mister, Bonne Clarinette’. On recounting the tale, our dear friend Andrew Cornall commissioned Tansy there and then as a celebration of Ensemble 10:10’s new residency at the Tung Auditorium”
Athanasia Kontou
Antigone: Pure in her crime (world premiere, Rushworth Composition prize winner)
When asked to compose a work for voice and ensemble inspired by a woman of Ancient Greece, I immediately thought of Antigone. I have deeply admired Antigone’s character since I first studied the play as a teenager in school: even though she is aware of the danger she puts herself in, and the destiny that awaits her, she stands alone against everyone and pursues her noble goal to the bitter end. In her confrontations with Ismene and Creon, she shows bravery and vulnerability at the same time, never denying that her rebellion is an act of love, not a power game. I used extracts from Sophocles’ text that summarise the extraordinary arc of her character and include her most iconic quotes in the play.
The soloist embodies Antigone, and recreates her journey with her physicality. She never sings at the same time as the whole orchestra, in the same way that Antigone does not find any allies. Instead, she is accompanied by sparse textures – often just the viola soloist – and her words are punctuated by the percussion instruments. The full string section represents the other characters of the play: Ismene (with the violin soloist) and Creon (with the violoncello soloist). As Antigone fearlessly surpasses all the obstacles that come her way, her voice progressively gains more strength and the accompaniment from the viola and double bass sections becomes fuller and more intricate. In order to convey the juxtaposition of strength and vulnerability in Antigone’s character, the work begins and ends with her powerful last monologue, where she mourns for her early death, exposing her most humane and intimate moment.
My warm thanks to:
Ensemble 10/10, Clark Rundell and Rosie Middleton.
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Rushworth Foundation, for this extraordinary opportunity.
My mentor, Stephen Pratt, for his guidance through the development of the work.
My parents, Gregory Kontos and Maria Papageorgiou, both of whom have loved and taught ancient Greek tragedy for years, for helping me with theunderstanding of the original text.
Written by Athanasia Kontou
John Adams
With Chamber Symphony, I originally set out to write a children’s piece, and my intentions were to sample the voices of children and work them into a fabric of acoustic and electronic instruments. But before I began that project, I had another one of those strange interludes that often lead to a new piece. I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schoenberg’s Op. 9 Chamber Symphony of 1906 and as I was doing so, I became aware that my seven-year-old son, Sam, was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the 50s). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.
“Chamber music”, with its inherently polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles, was always difficult for me to compose. But the Schoenberg symphony provided a key to unlock that door, and it did so by suggesting a format in which the weight and mass of a symphonic work could be married to the transparency and mobility of a chamber work. The tradition of American cartoon music — and I freely acknowledge that I am only one of a host of people scrambling to jump on that particular bandwagon — also suggested a further model for a music that was at once flamboyantly virtuosic and polyphonic.
Written by John Adams