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Bridget at Carnegie

Bridget Kibbey performs the premiere of Caja de musica tonight at Carnegie's Weill hall. (Tickets)

The City Opera performance of A Bird in Your Ear is on Saturday, the VOX website has sold out, but apparently a good number of the (free) registered tickets don't get taken up, so the organises are telling us that people who turn up on the day should have a good chance of being getting in.



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Gumboots and Groanbox Recordings

The Groanbox Boys and Metropolis Ensemble conducted by Andrew Cyr play Groanbox Mvt 4: Redhook Revival Rival.

The Carnegie Hall website has released the recording of the world premiere performance of Gumboots by Todd Palmer and the St Lawrence Quartet. I've recently been doing some re-working on the piece, sprucing and tightening it up. I've also uploaded all 4 movements from Groanbox, also from the world premiere, played by the Metropolis Ensemble and the Groanbox Boys at LPR in January. As you can see above, a great video of the complete piece is now also available on my Groanbox page, and video of the Groanbox Boys subsequent set, together with Michael's lagerphone piece Kicking Up Dust can be found on the Metropolis Ensemble's page on vimeo



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Bird at NYU

As a tie-in with the VOX performance of A Bird in Your Ear, students at NYU have been rehearsing extracts from the opera and will be giving a performance of them tomorrow, April 15th, at The Frederick Loewe Theater, 35 West 4th Street, NYC (3:30 - 4:45), together with another of this year's VOX operas, Car Crash Opera by Michaela Eremiasova and Jairo Duarte-Lopez. The students will repeat the performances as a masterclass for NYCO's Maestro Gerald Steichen at New York State Theater building (exact location tbc) on Apr 24th. Anyone interested in attending please contact me.



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VOX video

NYCO VOX has put up a nice introductory video to this year's VOX Festival:

http://www.vox-nyco.com/index.html

The site also has a page to tickets for the event here which is free but which sold out last year, so well worth booking in advance if you're thinking of attending.



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St Albans Organ Museum

If mechanical instruments are your thing, you absolutely must visit the St Albans Instrument Museum, which boasts a startling array of musical contraptions, my favourite of which is probably the mechanical violin and piano duet. Check out this youtube clip for a hint of the flavour.



Now read about my piece Caja de musica (which means "music box" in Spanish) which is inspired partly by music boxes and other mechanical instruments.



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My new solo harp piece

Introducing Caja de música, my new piece for solo harp, commissioned by the Concert Artists Guild, and written for the unspeakably awesome talents of Bridget Kibbey.

Please everyone come to the premiere at Carneige's Weill Hall, April 28th. Details here



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Gumboots Interview

Carnegie Hall has published an interview I did with them shortly before the premiere of Gumboots last October. In it you can hear me talk about my love of world music instruments shops, explain the connection between my temperament and gumboot dancing, and hear excerpts of Piosenki and Gumboots.








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NYCO VOX details confirmed

Details of New York City Opera's 2009 VOX Festival have been announced. After 10 years of the festival I'm honoured that A Bird in your Ear will mark their 100th festival presentation (my piece will be the final performance of this year's festival, and is scheduled for Saturday May 2nd at 4:50pm). It's especially exciting as, for the first time this year, composers have access to the full NYC Opera Chorus, so we've chosen selections from Bird which feature the chorus prominently. Should be very exciting..

More details here

Press write-ups on Playbill and Broadway World



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Sung Eun Lee

Huge congratulations to Sung Eun Lee, who was named as one of four winners of the 2009 Metropolitan Opera National Council Competition on Sunday. As the NY Times cheekily says

"This singing competition is too venerable to be called 'Metropolitan Idol', but the consequences for young careers are just as great as with 'American Idol'"

Sung Eun created the role (as they say) of Ivan in the Bard College premiere of A Bird in Your Ear, and I'm thrilled to see his career is developing so well.



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Aimee Bender

Pretty much everyone I've introduced Aimee Bender's work to has become an instant convert. Start with this online reading Aimee gave of her short story The Meeting, which for me is just the most perfect short story. A lot of Aimee's work seems to describe thoughts and feelings I thought only I had, often thoughts I hadn't even articulated to myself, indeed her ability to describe men's thoughts can be unnerving!

Apart from the depth, the other thing that attracts me to Aimee's writing is the surface which is witty and often surreal - but across the numerous short-stories there is never a dogmatic way of dealing with surrealism, it just crops up here and there when the story demands it. The work has a matter-of-fact acceptance of the extraordinary which I find very appealing.

Check out The girl with the flammable skirt and Willful Creatures (short story collections) and the novel An invisible sign of my own.



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