News

Posted on 15 Jul 2019

Adam Swayne of the Riot Ensemble will give the world premiere of my new set of piano pieces, Inventions (for Heath Robinson), on 2 August. The pieces will be performed at Riot's gig at the Petworth Festival in Sussex, alongside a new ensemble piece by Terence Allbright and works by Ann Cleare, Gabriella Smith, Cassandra Miller, Paul Burnell and Klaus Huber. In advance of the concert, I...

Posted on 05 Jul 2019

A brief roundup of some recent performances: The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, performed my Codex (Homage to Serafini) at London's Cadogan Hall last month. The performance is supported by the PRS for Music Foundation's Resonate scheme, which supports repeat performances of British orchestral works – the BBC Symphony Orchestra did it in 2013. A couple of weeks before, the SOL Quartet gave a recital in Water Into Beer, literally...

Posted on 22 Jan 2019

As part of my post as Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge, I've curated a pair of concerts at the college in early 2019, featuring music by me alongside other interesting pieces… Firstly, the Fidelio Trio will perform on 6 February, and will perform my Piano Trio "The Chronophage", alongside Piano Trio Two by Judith Weir (a...

Posted on 01 Nov 2018

You can now buy the scores of my Études for solo violin (2010/2014) from the Faber Music Store. As always, I'm grateful to the peerless editorial team at Faber Music. The first two of the Études were written for Sarah Hill and first performed by her in Manchester in 2010, while numbers 3 & 4 were commissioned by the London Sinfonietta for Jonathan Morton in 2014. Daniel...

Posted on 09 Oct 2018

My first opera (title to be announced!), written with playwright Alice Birch, will be performed across the UK in summer and autumn 2020 – at the Aldeburgh Festival and at a number of venues on tour. It is a co-commission for Music Theatre Wales and Aldeburgh Festival. The story concerns the inhabitants of a village which begins losing hours from its day – one night,...

Posted on 04 Jul 2018

The talented young players of the Britten Sinfonia Academy are performing my new set of orchestrations of Robert Schumann's Studies in Canonic Form Op. 56, on the 12th, 13th and 14th July. I'm delighted that they're being performed alongside two of my desert island pieces – Webern's arrangement of Bach's Ricercar a 6, and Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. All of the music in the concert, then, involves orchestrations...

Posted on 25 Jun 2018

The Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, gave the Dutch premiere of Sonnet Machine in a concert at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw on Saturday as part of the Holland Festival. You can now hear the broadcast on NPO Radio 4, alongside music by George Benjamin (Sometime Voices, Dance Figures and his arrangement of Bach's Canon & Fugue from the Art of Fugue), and Edward Nesbit...

Posted on 24 May 2018

My new String Quartet is being premiered by the Arditti Quartet this Tuesday 29 May, in a special concert at London's newly reopened Purcell Room in memory of Leo Hepner. Written in five movements, it features unusual tunings for half the instruments – the 2nd violin has all its strings tuned down a semitone, the viola has its strings tuned down a tone. Leo...

Posted on 11 May 2018

My piece Codex (Homage to Serafini), premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2013, will receive a performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London's Cadogan Hall in June 2019, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru. The performance is supported by the PRS for Music Foundation's Resonate scheme, which supports repeat performances of British orchestral works. The piece was inspired by Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, a beautiful and...