RNCM Brand New Orchestra (7.30pm)

‘For there is hope of a tree, If it be cut down, that it will sprout again, And that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, And the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, And bring forth boughs like a plant.’ – Job 14:7-9 KJV

Keep our faith alive and we will be strong again.

This piece was written with the intention to evoke the concept of the visual phenomena of camera lens vignetting, with the subject matter of the depicted image being a dragonfly. Throughout the piece, through the utilisation the solo cello, this ‘image’ of a dragonfly slowly begins to come into focus. The solo cello starts buried in dense insect like textures in the orchestra but as the piece continues, it emerges and takes on a soloistic role.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Richard Newitt Fund for their support of my post-graduate studies.

Dissolve is written for full orchestra but was inspired by the vocal work, Embers. As a vocal piece the soundworld was intimate and fragile. The challenge of converting that into a work for full orchestra was immense but brought a fantastic new lease of life and command to the music, capitalising on the contrast between build, decay, and silence.

This piece has a linear structure, progressively gaining energy and momentum until a final climax at the end. The violins have an ostinato which gets incrementally higher in pitch and eventually changes to double bowing before the end. All the pitched material that is not derived from this ostinato is based on 6 basic ideas. These ideas are the quintuplets first seen at bar 8, the sustained chords in the trombones, cellos and double basses first seen at figure 1, the melodic fragment first seen at bar 30 – 32 in the clarinets, trumpets, flutes and bassoons, the semiquaver and triplet motif first seen at figure 5 in the clarinets, the fanfare like material in the trumpets and trombones first seen from bar 63 and the motif first seen from bar 66 in the bass trombone, tuba and double basses. These ideas are repeated in different combinations and varied using techniques such as transposition, inversion and changes of instrumentation.

Note by Lucy Hale.

This piece is focused on the interplay between two objects, highly distinct in harmonic and timbral quality, and exploring the effect of colliding them at greater and greater levels of intensity, until they fracture and break down. These two objects alternate throughout the first half of the piece, with long sections of the first object being interrupted by interjections of the second. These interjections grow more frequent, as both timbres increase in their intensity and reach extremes of pitch and dynamics. At the midpoint of the piece, the two timbres ‘crash’; aspects of both combine both timbrally and harmonically in a loud, intense climax. This then leads into the second half of the piece, in which both objects are transformed into broken, unstable forms.

The word vision is applicable to both the literal act of seeing (physical reality) and the ability to use one’s imagination, either consciously or unconsciously, to conjure images and dreams. I encourage the audience to allow their own ‘visions’ to manifest themselves as they listen to this piece of music.

Pale Fire is a 1962 work of fiction by Vladimir Nabokov. The plot centres around a poet called John Shade who, shortly before he died, completed a cryptic 999-line poem entitled Pale Fire. I have set three extracts of the poem to music, in three sections for tenor and orchestra which tell the story of Shade’s life. I have tried to capture Nabokov’s dark wit and colourful prose in my music, as well as reflecting the unique poem-novel hybrid form of Pale Fire, by creating a musical work which is a song-opera hybrid. Furthermore, as Nabokov quotes Shakespeare and numerous other authors, I have quoted from a number of famous musical works, including Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Mahler’s Symphony No 2. The overall effect should be one of multiple layers and allusions which only heighten the ultimate sense of tragedy which is in so much of Nabokov’s writing.

Lush, rich harmony is obscured behind a façade of noise, as they circle and intertwine with each other, vying for the foreground. As the pieces plays out, this relationship is explored; the harmony occasionally piercing through the noise while the noise is weaving its way around the harmony. The strings glide over the top of this contest, undecided and teetering on the edge of both noise and pitch. The piece approaches its climax as both layers contend to entirely drown out the other until just one remains.

VIOLIN 1

Benedict Holland

Grainne White

Jocelyn Lau

Christopher Newton

Ailsa Burns

Samuel Kane

Sarah Razlin

Rory Masterson

Blair Taylor

VIOLIN 2

Samy Okuma-Chin

James Warburton

Yutong Jiang

Jasmine Morris

Dylan Latham

Aleksandar Petrov

Jessica Holding

Coraleigh Kelly-Edwards

VIOLAS

Michaela Jones

Ellie Waddington

Conrad Ihering

Emily Tomlinson

Rebecca Stubbs

CELLOS

Neil Sild

Rebekah Clarke

Lucy McLuckie

Esther Skipp

BASSES

Sara Banks

Marcelo NunesRodrigues

FLUTES

Leah Wing

Isabeau Hansen

Xiaowen Liu (picc+alto)

OBOES

Emma Chan

Will Graham

Mariam Jackson (cor)

CLARINETS

Thomas Knollys

Nathan Kenworthy

John Kelly (bass)

SAXOPHONE

Carys Nunn

BASSOONS

Theo Puddu

Ruiying Wang

Erline Moreira (contra)

HORNS

Tom Hutchison

Cecily OBrien

Dominic Allison

Chak Hin Lo

TRUMPETS

Robbie Richardson

James Corking

Leo Parry

TROMBONES

James Hunt

Roz Fearnehough

Oliver Atherton

TUBA

Josh Allen

TIMPANI

Calum Montgomery

PERCUSSION

Luna Chang

Simone Herbert-Moores

Kiki Liang

HARP 

Angharad Huw

Holly-Alice Morton

PIANO

Harry Lai (Cook, Hale, Martin)

Michael Shiu (Lau, Vickers)