St Martin in the Fields

 Trafalgar Square

 Tuesday February 26^th 2008

 1pm

 

                         Violin Sonata – Julian Dawes

                        Vision of Enoch – Celia Harper

                        On the Green – John Carmichael

               for Wind Ensemble

 Admission Free

 

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Advance Notice

On the 14th December 2008 at 7.30

there will be a concert of Julian's music and the Wigmore Hall, London

Works will include:
Elegie for Violin and Piano
Sonatina for Clarinet in B flat and Piano
Sonata for Violin and Piano
Sonata for Cello and Piano (World Premiere)

Clarinettist to be announced
Serena Leader - Violin
Gemma Rosefield - Cello
Gordon Back - Piano

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Three Premières

MALCOLM MILLER applauds
the latest concert of music by Julian Dawes

The variety of genres for which Julian Dawes has composed in recent years is impressive and refreshing, and the latest concert devoted to his works, at Lauderdale House, London UK, on Sunday 8 October 2006, featured three premières in three different instrumental combinations, including a substantial new violin sonata played by the gifted violinist Serena Leader with the distinguished accompanist Gordon Back.

Dawes' style displays echoes of mixed influences, the English pastoralism of Herbert Howells, his teacher, and Walton, for example, and the more biting European modernism of Shostakovich, Kurt Weill and even Stravinsky. This is especially evident in Dawes' extensive oeuvre of music for the stage, which includes officially recognised incidental music for Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. It was the incidental music for another play, an adaptation of Kafka's The Trial by the Cherub Company in 2002, that formed the inspiration for the first of the premières, Nine Inventions for Alto Saxophone and Violin. These aphoristic miniatures, arranged in contrasting sequence, colourfully conveyed both lyricism and piquant wit, set in delightfully playful two part imitative counterpoint. The first spiky invention gave way to a lyrical movement, then a waltz and a paired slow and fast movement. A sibling duo of Joe and Serena Leader brought out the swapping of lines and voices with well-matched tone and incisiveness, especially in the sixth and seventh inventions, both bluesy and jazzy, contrasting with the alternations of spiky and smooth inventions that culminate in a calm and plangent mood.

The Four Reflections on Psalm 134 for piano duet, the most recent of Dawes' premières, was composed for the distinguished musicologist, composer and pianist Alex Knapp on the occasion of his retirement from his position as Research Fellow in Jewish Music at SOAS, University of London, and it was performed by composer and dedicatee with poise and aplomb. The piece is full of interest, each movement a response to a verse from the Psalm. The first two were imbued with poignant dissonance, with well-meshed textures, suggestive of Messiaen. The expressive heart was the third movement, a moving 'song without words', echoing 'The Lord is nigh unto them that are of broken heart', while the final movement built gradually to a mood of affirmation.

The first half of the programme featured other recent works, including the Songs from the Chinese for Soprano and Guitar, composed as a birthday gift for the composer's wife earlier in the year. Vivienne Bellos, accompanied with delicacy by Stewart French, brought out the exquisite colours and moods of the love songs, in which the intimate tone is conveyed through sparse accompaniments and high vocal lines that make telling use of offbeat melismas and silences. The guitar fills the silence in 'A Soldier Departs', where the 'girl gets down from her loom so emotional she cannot speak'. The bold motoric ostinato in 'True Love Harmonies' made the delicate dissonance in the slow 'A Sweet Thought' all the more compelling, and the 'flirtatious strings' that conclude 'Shy Love' were conveyed in the cyclic recall of the initial guitar patterns of the work. The two other works performed showed a darker, searching side of Dawes' subject matter and idiom. Five Songs from I never saw another butterfly, a cycle composed to children's poetry from Terezin, were sung with touching characterisation by the twelve-year-old Michael Beder with the composer at the piano. (The present writer was the pianist in the world première in January 2005.) The harrowing, yet moving poetry describing the impressions of Jewish children separated from their families in the Nazi prison city, is set to poignant and unusually beautiful music by Dawes, ever responsive to the dramatic possibilities of the text and the constraints of young performers.

A similarly inward mood was evoked in the Elegie for Violin and Piano of 1988, a memorial to the composer's mother, performed here with expressive richness by Serena Leader and Gordon Back (who had given the Wigmore Hall première), its insistent melodic fragment subjected to extensive development and dramatization in the faster, angrier middle section. The duo returned at the end of the evening to give the world première of the Sonata for Violin (2005), a substantial work, by and large in a classical format yet with a central slow movement that was quite beautiful, dreamy, free and improvisatory in spirit. Here Dawes' harmonic idiom loosened up, moving away from triadic constraints through to richer, flowing sonorities, which were evocatively portrayed by Serena Leader partnered with subtle nuance by Gordon Back. A taut clear-cut sonata design in the first movement displayed characteristic Dawesian harmony, its luminous chordal second subject introduced by the piano as a contrast to the ostinato coloured lyrical first subject. There was an original touch also to the finale, the Rondo theme of which was assigned to solo violin, a rhythmic dance suggesting Chassidic folklore and the caustic syncopated textures of Shostakovich, Prokofiev or Stravinsky. The piano's resonant episodes were all the more lyrical in effect, and the whole movement provided an aptly upbeat flourish to a well-balanced and varied evening of stimulating musical nourishment.

Copyright © 12 October 2006 Malcolm Miller, London UK

http://www.mvdaily.com/ Kol Nidre – Max Bruch

 Serena Leader – Violin
Andrea Hess - Cello
Camille Maalawy – Mezzo Soprano
The New London Synagogue Choir
Joseph Finlay – Conductor
Julian Dawes - Piano

Three Premières

MALCOLM MILLER applauds
the latest concert of music by Julian Dawes

The variety of genres for which Julian Dawes has composed in recent years is impressive and refreshing, and the latest concert devoted to his works, at Lauderdale House, London UK, on Sunday 8 October 2006, featured three premières in three different instrumental combinations, including a substantial new violin sonata played by the gifted violinist Serena Leader with the distinguished accompanist Gordon Back.

Dawes' style displays echoes of mixed influences, the English pastoralism of Herbert Howells, his teacher, and Walton, for example, and the more biting European modernism of Shostakovich, Kurt Weill and even Stravinsky. This is especially evident in Dawes' extensive oeuvre of music for the stage, which includes officially recognised incidental music for Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. It was the incidental music for another play, an adaptation of Kafka's The Trial by the Cherub Company in 2002, that formed the inspiration for the first of the premières, Nine Inventions for Alto Saxophone and Violin. These aphoristic miniatures, arranged in contrasting sequence, colourfully conveyed both lyricism and piquant wit, set in delightfully playful two part imitative counterpoint. The first spiky invention gave way to a lyrical movement, then a waltz and a paired slow and fast movement. A sibling duo of Joe and Serena Leader brought out the swapping of lines and voices with well-matched tone and incisiveness, especially in the sixth and seventh inventions, both bluesy and jazzy, contrasting with the alternations of spiky and smooth inventions that culminate in a calm and plangent mood.

The Four Reflections on Psalm 134 for piano duet, the most recent of Dawes' premières, was composed for the distinguished musicologist, composer and pianist Alex Knapp on the occasion of his retirement from his position as Research Fellow in Jewish Music at SOAS, University of London, and it was performed by composer and dedicatee with poise and aplomb. The piece is full of interest, each movement a response to a verse from the Psalm. The first two were imbued with poignant dissonance, with well-meshed textures, suggestive of Messiaen. The expressive heart was the third movement, a moving 'song without words', echoing 'The Lord is nigh unto them that are of broken heart', while the final movement built gradually to a mood of affirmation.

The first half of the programme featured other recent works, including the Songs from the Chinese for Soprano and Guitar, composed as a birthday gift for the composer's wife earlier in the year. Vivienne Bellos, accompanied with delicacy by Stewart French, brought out the exquisite colours and moods of the love songs, in which the intimate tone is conveyed through sparse accompaniments and high vocal lines that make telling use of offbeat melismas and silences. The guitar fills the silence in 'A Soldier Departs', where the 'girl gets down from her loom so emotional she cannot speak'. The bold motoric ostinato in 'True Love Harmonies' made the delicate dissonance in the slow 'A Sweet Thought' all the more compelling, and the 'flirtatious strings' that conclude 'Shy Love' were conveyed in the cyclic recall of the initial guitar patterns of the work. The two other works performed showed a darker, searching side of Dawes' subject matter and idiom. Five Songs from I never saw another butterfly, a cycle composed to children's poetry from Terezin, were sung with touching characterisation by the twelve-year-old Michael Beder with the composer at the piano. (The present writer was the pianist in the world première in January 2005.) The harrowing, yet moving poetry describing the impressions of Jewish children separated from their families in the Nazi prison city, is set to poignant and unusually beautiful music by Dawes, ever responsive to the dramatic possibilities of the text and the constraints of young performers.

A similarly inward mood was evoked in the Elegie for Violin and Piano of 1988, a memorial to the composer's mother, performed here with expressive richness by Serena Leader and Gordon Back (who had given the Wigmore Hall première), its insistent melodic fragment subjected to extensive development and dramatization in the faster, angrier middle section. The duo returned at the end of the evening to give the world première of the Sonata for Violin (2005), a substantial work, by and large in a classical format yet with a central slow movement that was quite beautiful, dreamy, free and improvisatory in spirit. Here Dawes' harmonic idiom loosened up, moving away from triadic constraints through to richer, flowing sonorities, which were evocatively portrayed by Serena Leader partnered with subtle nuance by Gordon Back. A taut clear-cut sonata design in the first movement displayed characteristic Dawesian harmony, its luminous chordal second subject introduced by the piano as a contrast to the ostinato coloured lyrical first subject. There was an original touch also to the finale, the Rondo theme of which was assigned to solo violin, a rhythmic dance suggesting Chassidic folklore and the caustic syncopated textures of Shostakovich, Prokofiev or Stravinsky. The piano's resonant episodes were all the more lyrical in effect, and the whole movement provided an aptly upbeat flourish to a well-balanced and varied evening of stimulating musical nourishment.

Copyright © 12 October 2006 Malcolm Miller, London UK

http://www.mvdaily.com/