Two June concerts from the Echo Ensemble chamber orchestra showcase new works by their director and conductor Noah Max. Barely twenty, Noah’s already a frighteningly accomplished artistic polymath – a conductor, cellist, chorister, New Music advocate and musical entrepreneur who’s also nurturing successful side careers as a painter, poet and filmmaker. As a composer, he’s already lined up a stack of diverse works, performed not only by Echo but by the Ebor Singers, the Marryat Players, the Barbican Piano Trio and Duo d’Oro. (All this, and still no website…) As for the ensemble, they’re a mere couple of years old, but are already making significant ripples in the British classical community and being hailed for their power and imaginative focus.
The first of the two concerts is part of the Albert Hall’s ‘Love Classical’ season, tucked away in the Elgar Room: it also features Mozart’s ‘Symphony No. 29’ and Taneyev’s ‘Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 30’. The Max piece is the world premiere of his complete suite ‘Immolation Dances’ which, as he recalls, “began life a year ago as a ballet which wound together tales such as Icarus and the myth of the Phoenix. The writing process has burned away all but the fiery core of the piece, a white-hot suite of warped dances which explore my fascination with heat and light, resonance, pain and healing. Although its narrative has become more abstract, I hope the piece remains a blazing, emotionally charged inferno, all the more intense for its brevity.”
The second – ‘The Ancient Tomorrow’, at St Gabriels Pimlico – presents “a programme spanning from Edvard Grieg’s vision of 1600s Norway to the world premiere of a major new work for string orchestra… via neglected French composer André Jolivet’s neoclassical firecracker of a flute concerto.” The Grieg work is ‘Aus Holbergs Zeit’; the Jolivet is his “spontaneous and symmetrical” 1949 ‘Concerto for Flute and Strings’ which they’ll be playing with guest flautist Frederico Paixão (interesting, too, to note the polymathic interests Jolivet and Max share). The new string orchestra piece (another world premiere) is the Max one, ‘The Chakras’, for which information is thin on the ground: check later for the Echo Ensemble’s Facebook page, which seems to be Noah’s main outlet for comments and updates.
A couple of Noah Max’s previous orchestral pieces are on show below…
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Marsyas Trio (featuring flautist Helen Vidovich, cellist Val Welbanks and, since late 2017, pianist Olga Stezhko) continue their mission to encourage and perform new repertoire with a concert at the 1901 Club entirely dedicated to premieres, courtesy of various members of the London Composers’ Forum.
On the programme are Peter Openshaw ‘Caput redivivum’; ‘Drift’ (by former Fin De Siecle frontwoman and current soundtrack composer Isa Suarez); Illumination Chamber Choir leader Miriam Mackie‘s ‘Same Place’; Alan Taylor‘s ‘Muted & Changing Voices’; Michael Regan‘s ‘In The Shadows’, Alan Hilton‘s ‘Trio’ and Elizabeth Sharma‘s ‘Songs Of The Night’. I’ve not been able to find much in the way of summaries for any of these, but you might be able to find out a little more if you wangled your way into the pre-concert LCF workshop at Goldsmith’s on 2nd June (free to students and LCF members).
In addition, below are some previous examples of work from most of the composers involved, including what sounds like a synthesized demo of the Hilton piece (plus a little of the Marsyas Trio in action a few years ago, with soprano Jessica Summers at the much-missed Forge in Camden).
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On the subject of Goldsmiths, several of their postgraduate music students (alongside others from Guildhall School of Music & Drama and from the University of Cambridge) will be debuting compositions at a Union Chapel concert on the 10th.
‘Mixture: New Music For Organ and Electronics’ is the capstone concert in a six-month series in which current compositional and performance technology is being brought into play with the chapel’s reknowned Henry Willis pipe organ. For such a grand undertaking, this is a surprisingly undersung event (which I’m going to latch onto as my excuse for not having followed the whole series). The Goldsmiths contingent are Robert Murray Jamieson, Maeve, Elisabeth Salverda, Rachel Gibson and Elizabeth Hill-Laurence: that leaves one place apiece for Cambridge and Guildhall, but it’s not clear who those last two composers are. Still, at a ticket price of only £3.50, it’s probably worth dropping by on spec just to find out.
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Dates:
London Composers’ Forum Workshop with Marsyas Trio for ‘Trios For Our Time’
Room 163, Richard Hoggart Building @ Goldsmiths (University of London), Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, England
Sunday 2nd June 2019, 12.30pm and 4.30pm – information here and here
Echo Ensemble @ Love Classical
Elgar Room @ Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge, London, SW7 2AP, England
Tuesday 4th June 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
‘Mixture: New Music For Organ and Electronics’
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Monday 10th June 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
London Composers Forum presents:
Marsyas Trio: ‘Trios For Our Time’
1901 Club, 7 Exton Street, Waterloo, London, SE1 8UE, England
Wednesday 12th June 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here
Echo Ensemble: ‘The Ancient Tomorrow’
St Gabriel’s Pimlico, Warwick Square, Pimlico, London, SW1V 2AD, England
Thursday 27th June 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Misfit City 