UK premieres by Chin, Dean and Kats-Chernin
(March 2008)
Over the coming months audiences can hear UK premieres of works by three leading international composers: Unsuk Chin, Brett Dean and Elena Kats-Chernin.
Unsuk Chin: Xi (UK premiere)
10 April, City Halls, Glasgow
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ilan Volkov
Korean-born composer Unsuk Chin, has long been fascinated with how electronic sounds can be integrated with, or recreated through, live performance, and her 1997 composition Xi provides a highlight of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s collaboration with IRCAM in Glasgow (7-12 April). In Korean Xi means the smallest unit or the origin of all things, and Chin’s work grows from the primordial sound of breathing from an instrumentalist, evolving to fill the full chromatic spectrum. The work was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the electronics were created by Chin in the studio of the Technical University in her home city of Berlin.
> Read more about the BBCSSO & IRCAM event
Chin’s most recent orchestral work, Rocana, received first performances in Montreal and New York recently under the baton of Kent Nagano. Her highly successful operatic adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for the Bavarian State Opera will be released on DVD by EuroArts in May.
Brett Dean: Ariel’s Music (UK premiere)
18 April, Barbican, London
21 April, BBC Radio 3 broadcast
Michael Collins/BBC Symphony Orchestra/John Storgårds
Brett Dean has an inherent gift for orchestral drama, which has particularly attracted him to concertos where soloist is pitted against orchestra. His first essay in the form, Ariel’s Music, is a clarinet concerto dating from 1995, which won Dean an award from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Michael Collins is soloist in this powerful work which moves from an elegiac slow movement to a biting Dance of Death. The Ariel of the title is the name of a seven-year-old Australian Aids-victim who died in 1988. Her mother Elisabeth Glaser, who had contracted the disease from an emergency blood transfusion when pregnant with Ariel, campaigned to raise awareness, raising $30 million before herself dying of the illness in 1994.
> Read more about the Ariel's Music premiere
The BBC Symphony has forged a close working relationship with Brett Dean: the composer appeared as soloist in the world premiere of his Viola Concerto in 2005, and the violin concerto written for Frank Peter Zimmermann, The Lost Art of Letter Writing, features in the orchestra’s 2008/09 season. Dean’s Songs of Joy, drawn from his forthcoming opera Bliss, is premiered with Simon Rattle conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on 2 October as part of the city’s European Capital of Culture celebrations.
Elena Kats-Chernin: Ornamental Air (UK premiere tour)
17 May, Corn Exchange, Ipswich
18 May, The Swan, High Wycombe
Michael Collins/City of London Sinfonia/Richard Hickox
Michael Collins is also soloist in the UK premiere performances of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Ornamental Air for basset clarinet and chamber orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox. The work is an international co-commission between the North Carolina Symphony, City of London Sinfonia, Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The basset clarinet, a variant of the soprano clarinet, is historically associated with Mozart who wrote his Clarinet Quintet and Clarinet Concerto for Anton Stadler to perform on this instrument. Kats-Chernin’s work joins contemporary compositions by Harrison Birtwistle, Alan Hacker and Joan Tower.
> Read more about the Ornamental Air premiere
Wild Swans Competition
A true cosmopolitan composer, Elena Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent, studied in Moscow, Sydney and Hanover, and has been resident in Australia since 1994. Her music crosses similar frontiers – her popular Eliza Aria was first heard in her full-evening score for Australian Ballet’s Wild Swans, formed part of the orchestral suite recorded by ABC Records, has become familiar to millions in the UK as the music for Lloyds TSB’s For the Journey campaign, and was recently remixed as a pop single with vocals by Sarah Cracknell reaching No.11 in the UK charts.
Kats-Chernin visits London on 16 April when the Wild Swans Suite receives its UK premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra at a private concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Guest tickets can be won via a Classic FM competition.
> Wild Swans Competition at Classic FM
> Read more about Eliza Aria and Lloyds TSB's For the Journey
Photos: Chin (Hanya Chlala/ArenaPAL), Dean (Noosa Weekender), Kats-Chernin (Bridget Elliot)
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