La Belle Captive – 17th June

On the 17th June tuba player Jack Adler-McKean will perform a new piece of mine, La Belle Captive at his Gold Medal Recital at the RNCM. The Gold Medal recitals see 12 of the RNCM’s top performers compete for the Gold Medal award. The piece:

Taking its name from a painting by René Magritte, ‘La Belle Captive’ sees the tuba and piano create a directionless wash of harmonic and melodic material. The music seems to float serenely through a barren landscape until violent interjections begin to appear, first in the tuba then lagging behind in the piano. Rather than enacting a dialectic, the serenity and violence seem to coexist on different planes without interaction, drifting unpeturbed past one another at various points in the music. A similar relationship exists between the tuba and the piano – sometimes they are playing similar material, sometimes highly differentiated material, but any interaction seems almost co-incidental.

Jack will be playing the piece, scored for tuba and 4-hands piano, alongside new pieces by Robin Stevens and Simon Parkin, as well as repertoire pieces by William Kraft, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen. See details of the recital, happening at 9.30pm, here. Jack will also be playing a similar programme including my piece earlier, at his final year RNCM recital on the 2nd June.