One of the three great concerts that ended this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
Frank Denyer(b1943)'s The Fish that Became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed) took most of a decade to compose, and was completed 28 years ago. It was recorded for the another timbre label earlier this year, in a series of four sessions, and the same performers were involved in this World Premiere performance, held in Huddersfield Town Hall on Saturday 23rd November. Scored for 37 performers, arranged in a variety of ensembles scattered around the Hall, and playing a diverse set of existing, "found" (including a set of beautiful wooden organ pipes that Denyer rescued from a skip outside a gutted church) and invented, and most using different tuning temperaments, the "logistics" of a performance are understandably problematical - but, as with all Denyer's work, the individual timbres of these instruments and tunings are carefully chosen, creating unique sounds exactly needed for the aesthetic and emotional course of this beautiful, powerful, disturbing, and profoundly moving work. This masterpiece (no need to be reluctant to call it what it is) takes a smidgen under an hour to perform, not a second of which is wasted - if I had to nominate one of those "if you only listen to one New Music Show this year" tasks, this would be my choice.
Nothing else mentioned on the programme website - which either means there's going to be a very long introduction to the work (excerpts from Robert Worby's pre-concert discussion with the composer [an engaging and fascinating man] would be very welcome), or they've missed some details out from the website. The HCMF Programme Book advertised a couple of different works to be broadcast in tonight's programme:
Bryn Harrison(b1969): Dead Time, performed by ensemble Wet Ink in Phipps Hall on Wednesday, 20th Nov
Hanna Hartman(b1961): Black Bat, an electro-acoustic work, composed for the "secretive, sex-fuelled", "crushing speakers" of the Berghain night-club in Berlin. (Performed in the late-night event in the Richard Steinitz Building on Tuesday, 19th.)
... so they might turn up.
Frank Denyer(b1943)'s The Fish that Became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed) took most of a decade to compose, and was completed 28 years ago. It was recorded for the another timbre label earlier this year, in a series of four sessions, and the same performers were involved in this World Premiere performance, held in Huddersfield Town Hall on Saturday 23rd November. Scored for 37 performers, arranged in a variety of ensembles scattered around the Hall, and playing a diverse set of existing, "found" (including a set of beautiful wooden organ pipes that Denyer rescued from a skip outside a gutted church) and invented, and most using different tuning temperaments, the "logistics" of a performance are understandably problematical - but, as with all Denyer's work, the individual timbres of these instruments and tunings are carefully chosen, creating unique sounds exactly needed for the aesthetic and emotional course of this beautiful, powerful, disturbing, and profoundly moving work. This masterpiece (no need to be reluctant to call it what it is) takes a smidgen under an hour to perform, not a second of which is wasted - if I had to nominate one of those "if you only listen to one New Music Show this year" tasks, this would be my choice.
Nothing else mentioned on the programme website - which either means there's going to be a very long introduction to the work (excerpts from Robert Worby's pre-concert discussion with the composer [an engaging and fascinating man] would be very welcome), or they've missed some details out from the website. The HCMF Programme Book advertised a couple of different works to be broadcast in tonight's programme:
Bryn Harrison(b1969): Dead Time, performed by ensemble Wet Ink in Phipps Hall on Wednesday, 20th Nov
Hanna Hartman(b1961): Black Bat, an electro-acoustic work, composed for the "secretive, sex-fuelled", "crushing speakers" of the Berghain night-club in Berlin. (Performed in the late-night event in the Richard Steinitz Building on Tuesday, 19th.)
... so they might turn up.
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