Open Music Project Call for Participants

Open Music Project Call for Participants

Stephen Graham's round up of classical music news and events, including New Sound Worlds, contemporary opera in London, Winter Music Weekend in Clare, Maria McGarry and a call for participants for the Open Music project.

The Open Music Project 2012

The Open Music Project is a mentoring scheme aimed at young and emerging composers who seek practical experience in realising scores and gaining performances. The compositions involved should be flexible in some sense, whether that be in the use of graphic or non-standard notation, or in their indeterminacy as regards some element of the performance or music.

The project is run by the Association of Irish Composers, with funding from the Arts Council, and will take place in four stages. The deadline for the first stage is 10 February, where expressions of interest and initial sketches are requested. By the completion of the fourth stage, which will take place at some point in May, participants will have completed a composition of up to nine minutes of length. The project will involve up to nine composers, and will be adjudicated by the mentoring panel of John McLachlan, Gráínne Mulvey and Peter Moran.

Chosen applicants who are not already members of the Association of Irish Composers will be invited to become members.

In order to apply to take part in the scheme, mail aic [at] eircom.net

New Sound Worlds at the National Concert Hall

The New Sound Worlds concert series continues on 18 January with a performance from pianist Thérèse Fahy. New Sound Worlds is curated by composer Siobhán Cleary and presented by Ireland Promoting New Music, an organisation that aims to promote the performance and dissemination of new music both of Irish and international origin. New Sound Worlds takes place monthly at 8.30p.m. in the Kevin Barry Room of the National Concert Hall, in association with the Contemporary Music Centre.

Fahy’s concert will include pieces from Ed Bennett, Jonathan Nangle, Ian Wilson, Siobhán Cleary and Kevin O Connell, in addition to music by Olivier Messiaen and Claude Debussy. New Sound Worlds continues in February and March with performances from the Argento Ensemble and Hugo Ticciati respectively.

Tickets are €15 and €8 (concessions) to all events.

nch.ie

Maria McGarry Debut Solo Album

Irish pianist Maria McGarry, graduate of the Juilliard School in New York and specialist in twentieth century piano repertoire, will launch her debut solo recital album, ’Twentieth Century Piano Masterworks’, on 15 January at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The disc features early-twentieth century repertoire from Alban Berg, Enrique Granados and Arnold Schoenberg, alongside excerpts from Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux and Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jesus. In 2006 McGarry was awarded a bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland to specialise in the performance of Olivier Messiaen’s music.

The launch will be preceded by a recital by Maria McGarry at the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, at 12.00pm on Sunday, 15 January. The recital is the conclusion to an Irish tour which was presented with a Music Network Performance and Touring Award. McGarry will perform arrangements of Bach, and Schumann’s Fantasie, in the recital.

classicallinks.ie

Present Voices Continues with Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest

The Barbican Centre in London’s Present Voices is a biennial series of contemporary opera. Present Voices continues in 2012, and will feature two British and one European premiere in its line-up.

Jonathan Harvey’s 2007 opera Wagner Dream, which is a fantasy set on the morning of Wagner’s death in Venice that imagines the possibility of Wagner realising his long-held ambition to write an opera on a Buddhist subject, will receive its UK premiere in a semi-staged concert performance with the BBC Concert Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins on 29 January.

Gerald Barry’s opera on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which premiered to huge acclaim in Los Angeles last year and features a libretto that was adapted from the play by Barry himself, will be performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Thomas Adès, with soloists including Barbara Hannigan, on 26 April. The performance will be repeated in Birmingham two days later.

Present Voices 2012 concludes with the British premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s 1976 masterpiece, Einstein on the Beach, on 4 May. Einstein will run at the Barbican Theatre until 13 May.

barbican.org.uk

Winter Music Weekend 2012

The thirteenth annual Shannonside Winter Music Weekend will take place in Sixmilebridge and Bunratty, County Clare, across 12–15 January. The programme features over 70 events in 12 different musical genres across four days. Highlights include folk musicians Brendan Walsh and Daniel Aherne, leading blues vocalist Mary Stokes, the Golden Star Morris Dancers, bluegrass acts Down and Out and Red Cloud Band, the Johnny Reidy Céilí Band, and a tribute session to Woody Guthrie.

Full details can be found at wmw.ie.

Published on 9 January 2012

Stephen Graham is a lecturer in music at Goldsmiths, University of London. He blogs at www.robotsdancingalone.wordpress.com.

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