Antic Rounds – 14th March

This Friday, the Bangor New Music Festival will play host to the premiere of a new piece of mine for chamber orchestra, entitled Antic Rounds. The piece will be performed by the Orchestra of the Swan, conducted by their director David Curtis, in a concert also featuring a premiere by festival director Guto Puw and pieces by Robert Saxton, Huw Watkins and Tansy Davies.

The festival’s theme is the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, and my piece takes its title from the witches’ scene in Act IV Scene I of Macbeth, the ‘antic rounds’ referring to the significant amount of canonic writing the piece. It’s scored for 4 winds, 3 brass, 2 percussionists and a string section minus the violins – read my programme note here.

I’ll be giving a pre-concert talk at 6.30 alongside Guto Puw and violinist Madeleine Mitchell, where there will also be a performance by schoolchildren from Ysgol Talysarn and Ysgol Maesincla. The children from these schools have been working with myself and the Orchestra of the Swan’s Matthew Forbes to create music inspired by Shakespeare’s stories.