Performances between 2022 and 2023

Ghost Trance Music

Plus Minus Ensemble

19:00, Thursday 17 February 2022
Reid Concert Hall
Edinburgh College of Art
EH8 9AG Edinburgh
United Kingdom

Ghost Trance Music

Plus Minus Ensemble

20:00, Friday 18 February 2022
Cafe OTO (external link)
18-22 Ashwin St, Dalston
E8 3DL London
United Kingdom

Explorations

Purcell Sessions

18:30, Saturday 2 April 2022
Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall (external link)
Southbank Centre
SE1 8XX London
United Kingdom

The joy of playing with sounds and their associations link the night’s three works. Matthew Shlomowitz (external link) creates a suite of miniatures which develop from musicological concepts into studies, blooming further into highly characterised portraits. Multiple tonalities interact with stumbling cross-rhythms and slipped loops, coming together in a finale of variations. Maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow’s Three Canons, written for the pianist Ursula Oppens, is a virtuoso demonstration of compositional control and fluency. Akiko Ushijima (external link)’s music shares this sense of enjoyment in manipulating material. Rhythmic figures interact and develop. Melodies cascade and distort into each other. Her new work combines the live piano with electronic sounds, each layer playing off the other.

48 Variations

Sampler Series

20:00, Wednesday 6 April 2022
L’Auditori: Oriol Martorell (external link)
Lepant 150
08013 Barcelona
Spain

John McGuire is one of the outstanding figures of post-70s music, influenced by his years working in the Westdeutscher Rundfunk electronic music studio in Cologne and by the pioneering experimentalism of the US music scene. His music draws together American experimentalism, total serialism and the world of Karlheinz Stockhausen (external link) to create the fascinating and unmistakable blend that many refer to as “post-minimalism”.

48 Variations for two pianos is a work commissioned by Herbert Henck, constructed on a series of patterns, building up the rhythm over time in a multi-layered structure. A complex, but intimate, universe of sound drawn from a harmonious sound source, immersing the listener in an ecstasy of perceptual uncertainty.

Roderick Chadwick and Mark Knoop, pianos.