Last week I played again at the excellent New Cut Arts Centre in Halesworth. Situated in rural Suffolk it’s an excellent venue where I’ve previously performed solo, and also with the “Touchable Dreams” show.
Last Sunday I was there with my duo partner Kelly Jones as “Phase 2″: This exciting collaboration has seen us exploring not only the acoustic violin duo repertoire, but also building up an interesting array of arrangements for electric/electric and electric/acoustic combinations.
Sunday’s show included duos by Wieniawski, Miklos Rozsa, Bartok, Judith Weir and Philip Hansell, plus arrangements of Arvo Part, Satie, Nyman and even Massive Attack, using a mixture of violins with, in some cases, some live looping. For two pieces I used my Bridge Octave violin, which is basically one octave lower than a normal instrument, providing some useful bass pitches.
We filmed and recorded the concert, in order to provide some useful clips for the new Phase 2 website, which I’m currently putting together at www.phase2duo.co.uk. Meanwhile here’s a video of the Nyman piece we played – a new one to our repertoire – which went down extremely well with the audience. I hope you enjoy it!
After many months of work, initially recording, then editing and mixing – plus a tremendous amount of time spent contacting poets and their publishers in order to get copyright permissions – my CD with Jeremy Harmer entitled “Touchable Dreams” is finally at the pressing plant ready for a September 1st release.
Because of the amount of time it took to get all the poetry permissions sorted – and we really only managed it due to some superb help from professional permissions person (what would be the correct title I wonder?) Rachel Thorne – and also due to a last minute refusal for what would have been our closing poem, we have been able not only to get the CD pretty well exactly as we would like, but were also able, while trying to find a replacement final track (and with some excellent inspiration from Jeremy!), to end the CD in a really (we hope) inspiring way.
I asked my son Chris to do the CD artwork and design for us, and he’s also taken some excellent photos at our most recent live show, some of which are now online on a new “Touchable Dreams” blog site – http://touchabledreams.posterous.com. Do take a look at it.
It’s now just over a year since we first did the show live, and it’s hard to stand back from it and view it objectively, but we feel that the CD is an exciting and fairly unique recording, mixing words and music in a way that we haven’t come across before. We certainly hope that others feel the same about it!
You can buy the signed, numbered limited edition “Touchable Dreams” CD from my online store. It will also be available for download from iTunes and other stores very soon (with just two poems missing where download permission was not forthcoming!).
Our next live “Touchable Dreams” show in the UK is in Ely on September 10th (details here), but we’re also doing it in Bucharest on September 4th!
Plans are also now afoot for a new show featuring the words of Charles Dickens. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” (A Tale of Two Cities)
Colchester Institute
Sheepen Road
Colchester, Essex, UK
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A concert by the Bingham String Quartet as part of the Colchester Institute Concert Series. The programme is called "Three of a Kind", and features Stravinsky's unusual "Three Pieces" alongside the third Quartets by fellow Russian composers Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Tickets available on the door.
Another chance to hear Ely Sinfonia's "Northern Lights" concert, first given on March 6th in Ely Cathedral, this time featuring Sibelius's "Finlandia" and "The Swan of Tuonela" instead of the violin concerto. I'll again be conducting the orchestra in this popular programme of pieces.
I'll be conducting Ely Sinfonia in an exciting programme of Scandinavian works: The superb Violin Concerto by Sibelius, played by the amazing British virtuoso Matthew Trusler, will be complemented by Grieg's popular "Peer Gynt" Suite and Nielsen's brooding Fifth Symphony.
