The London Sinfonietta: Thomas Adès and Steve Reich tour
Sunday 13 February 2011, 7:00PM, City Halls, Glasgow
Thomas Adès: In Seven Days – Concerto for Piano with Moving Image
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
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Friday 18 February 2011, 7:30PM, Royal Festival Hall, London
Steve Reich: Tehillim
Thomas Adès: In Seven Days – Concerto for Piano with Moving Image
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Friday 11 March 2011 7:30PM, Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thomas Adès: In Seven Days – Concerto for Piano with Moving Image
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
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Performed by:
Thomas Adès conductor
Nicolas Hodges piano
Synergy Vocals chorus
Tal Rosner visuals (In Seven Days)
Composer-conductor-pianist Thomas Adès, hailed as one of the world's leading voices in modern composition, joins the London Sinfonietta for three evenings of hypnotic and intricate music from master minimalist Steve Reich and a major work from Adès himself.
Adès’s video-ballet, In Seven Days – Concerto for Piano with Moving Image, is a collaboration with his partner, artist and filmmaker Tal Rosner, and follows the story of creation. It combines sound and video to create an experience that evokes stasis and hyperactivity, awe and wonder, the abstract and the definite. In an interview about the piece, Adès says: "So much of contemporary art is ironic and I don't think that's enough any more. Why would anyone be ashamed of beauty? It's a very 20th-century idea that you might be. Thankfully that's gone." Expect music that is bold but full of delicate and intricate harmonies and textures.
In Glasgow and Birmingham this is followed by Steve Reich's hour-long minimalist classic, Music for 18 Musicians, a spellbinding blend of voices and instruments, filled with recurring phrases and gently shimmering harmonies.
In London the concert is opened by Steve Reich’s Tehillim, a joyful, rhythmic and pulsating setting of four psalms for female singers and ensemble. Extending his trademark minimalist techniques for this half-hour, text-based piece, Reich creates a soundworld that mixes hypnotic rhythms, glowing harmonies and African-inspired percussion, building to an ecstatic climax. This is music to move you physically as well as emotionally!
Produced by the London Sinfonietta in collaboration with Sound and Music and the Southbank Centre
Watch an extract of In Seven Days
Read Peter Culshaw's interview with Thomas Adès
Listen to Music for 18 Musicians
Listen to Tehillim - part 1
Listen to Tehillim - part 3
Listen to Tehillim - part 4
