David Bruce - Composer

Silk Road Reflections

Silk Road Ensemble, rehearsing Cut the Rug in the beautiful Kirkland House, Junior Common Room, Harvard

I'm just back from an inspiring week in the presence of some of the finest musicians the world has to offer - and that's not just hyperbole, The Silk Road Ensemble really does contain just that. My piece Cut the Rug went down very well, and hopefully will feature in some future performances/tour of the ensemble.

But more interestingly, it was a very thought-provoking week in a variety of ways. It made me think for one about how I, as a composer of mainly notated music, interact with musicians via my score, and the pros and cons of that way of working, versus the aural traditions that exist in most other music cultures. I suppose in a way it reaffirmed my desire to work with musicians that have elements of both worlds - a particular revelation in this respect on this project was Syrian-born clarinettist Kinan Azmeh, who can read the most fiendishly notated music if required (he went to Julliard after all), but can also bring his rich cultural heritage to bear in his use of vibrato and ornamentation for example.

With Kinan Azmeh and Cristina Pato

Working with such a rich array of people from all sorts of cultures around the world inevitably leads you to contemplate ways of living in society and music's place within that. For example, Avi Avital, my hugely talented mandolin-playing friend, is an Israeli and he immediately hit it off with Kinan, a Syrian, and remarked to me that he felt that kinship you feel from someone who shares a similar background - here were two people who have an infinite amount of things in common, whether it be hummus (and how little the US version of hummus resembles the real thing); old TV shows they remember from their childhood in the Middle East; or simply a revulsion at the things that cause their two peoples to seem so far apart on the world stage. And interestingly, as far as the music goes, Kinan's style of playing is often mistaken for klezmer (unless he uses the distinctively arabic scales including quarter-tones), although both myself and Avi could hear something subtle but uniquely different in Kinan's tone.

As to the uses and functions of music in society, well of course most folk music originates in something fundamentally practical - a wedding, a funeral, a dance. I'm inspired by many of these traditions when I write, but of course my music is divorced from those social environments, so what is it's purpose?

I guess part of why I do what I do is to reflect on that very issue - to think about emotional and spiritual questions which are sometimes drowned out by modern life. To throw up these musical landscapes as a sort of hypothesis of things worth exploring.

And yet part of me still is aware of a certain disconnect or hypocracy inherent in what I do - I'm exploring riotous abandon through the use of precision notation; spontaneity through pre-meditation; the life of the body through the use of the mind; the music of 'the village' through something performed in the concert hall.

It's all very complicated, but I do feel that one of the things I want to explore more going forward is something less 'hypothetical' as it were, something that deals with the contemporary world I live in and faces it directly, even if it continues to posit alternatives to it. That probably won't make sense to anyone but me, but useful to try to articulate it.

Just to add to the mix, one of the other composers present for the week was the renowned jazz pianist Vijay Iyer (who wrote a fabulous piece for the group) and during a discussion with students he remarked 'all Classical music - whether it's Western, Iranian, Indian or any other - is basically music for rich people'. That's a very provocative statement, and if it's not true, I certainly haven't found a fully coherent way of refuting it.

Trying to squeeze a note out of the Gaita

Relating somewhat to all the above, I met Cristina Pato, the extraordinary Gaita (Galecian bagpipe) player of the ensemble on the first evening in Harvard. Somehow I immediately knew that she had to be part of my piece, so I got up at 5am the next morning and quickly found two spots for her in my piece. One was at the celebratory/death-defiant ending; the other was at the climax of an aching tutti melody in the third movement.

I've never experienced anything quite like how that moment turned out with Cristina playing - every time she played during rehearsal I would get goose-bumps, and I lost count of the number of people who said they were in tears at that point after the final performance. There is something so intense and raw about the bagpipe sound, it's like a beast, barely under the control of its master, that wails and screams. It's impossible not to be affected by it. The fact that such a moment happened during my piece I took as very little to do with my own creation, and much more to do with the instrument and its amazing 'custodian' - dear Cristina - but it was also one of those miraculous puffs of smoke that sometimes occur during the creative process. A late addition, cobbled together in the early morning before the first rehearsal, becomes the defining moment of the piece. Will someone please just tell me how I can learn from that and recapture it in future?!

Finally, on a lighter note, I was pleased on the train up to Boston to find us passing through my birth-town of Stamford, Connecticut - the first time I had been back since autumn 1970!

Stamford, Conn.

Spring Newsletter

To view the online version of my Spring 2012 newsletter please follow this link

Fire Designs

Check out this fantastic proposed design for my 20x12 Fire piece. The choristers (around 150 of them) form a giant soap-box-raised circle and a forest of wax torches forms the centerpiece. The audience comes in via the two gaps in the circle. Thanks for Mandy Dike and The World Famous, both for this awe-inspiring design and for allowing me to reproduce this here.

I've created what I hope will be quite an intense meditation on fire, with musical phrases repeating and bouncing around the circle. I finished the piece a few days ago and it's now making its way round to the various choirs that will be involved, so they have plenty of time to learn it. Coming to Salisbury, Brighton, Spitalfields and London's South Bank Center in May and June.

Music Box

In mid-Jan I'll be starting my Harvard residency with the Silk Road Ensemble, but just before that I'll be popping into the New York to catch my dear friend, harpist Bridget Kibbey's mouth-watering concerts at Le Poisson Rouge on Jan 11th and 15th. It's the first of a new Resident Artist series from my other dear friends, the Metropolis Ensemble, and features an amazing range of music from all over the world, including my own Caja de Musica (from whence the concert derives its title), a new piece by Paquito d'Rivera and also, coincidentally a new piece by Syrian clarinettist and composer Kinan Azmeh, who will be joining me to perform in the workshops in Harvard the following week. I'll be at LPR on the 15th, and I hope to see you there!

George and I - memories of George Benjamin's all-day classes at RCM

[cross-posted with CompositionToday]

I will always remember the lessons George Benjamin gave us at the Royal College of Music in the early 90s. In fact, they weren't lessons and they weren't at the Royal College (though they were paid for by them) - they took place roughly once a month at George's home, usually on a Sunday, and were somewhere closer to lecture, informal chat, intellectual debating society. They were the kind of events as a young artist you dreamed of being able to attend - like those given by Benjamin's own teacher Messiaen in Paris. There were great sandwiches at lunchtime (free food was always the way to any student's heart), in fact the only thing that prevented them being truly legendary was the lack of alcohol. If they'd taken place in a smoke-filled back room of a North London pub, I think it would by now be a shrine. But for George - always boyish in both appearance and in the giggling delight he took in his subject - well, I guess smokey pubs just weren't his style.

So on these Sunday mornings somewhere between ten and twenty usually rather gaunt composer-types would file in to George's house. There would generally be a morning session and an afternoon on a separate topic. In the morning he might take half an act of Janacek's Kata Kabanova and pick apart the ingenious ways he stretched and pulled a main theme, less a straight-forward 'thematic development' and more theme-as-elastic-band which maintained its most general shape but could be stretched to snapping point anywhere along its length. Then in the afternoon he might invite somebody amazing from the music world to come and talk. To this day I can't believe I missed the one when the great Indian bansuri flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia came - I knew and loved his playing even then, and can't think what could have been more important.

What made these sessions so riveting was George himself. He was so enthusiastic and full of passion it was impossible not to get caught up in it. I used to bring even non-musician friends along just to feel the extraordinary atmosphere of excited learning. I think they were the first events where I actually felt someone was teaching me things I needed to know as a composer, there was no waffle, this was visceral, direct injections into the nervous system of composing. Indeed I think the main thing I took away from all those sessions was how to learn, which, in a tritely simplistic way you could describe as 'quality not quantity'. I think until that point, as quite a late starter in my knowledge of classical music I had always felt a little daunted by the Julian Andersons of this world, who could expound at length about the fascinating second theme of Glazunov's 3rd Symphony. But here I realised that a day spent by yourself looking - really looking - at a single page of a Beethoven Symphony could yield more priceless information than a lifetime of academic textbooks. And I think it's the self part of that equation that is particularly important. We're all as artists trying to discover that thing which is as sickeningly easy to describe as it is unbearably hard to understand - our 'true voice'. And it's only by looking at things with your own eyes rather than through someone else's that you can start the process of finding it.

And it's strange now to realise that that mantra applies to George's lessons themselves. However much I loved those sessions, looking back from where I am now I can see that my 'true voice' is quite a long way from George's and that deeply inside I even knew that back then. I remember, for example, taking some pieces along to show George. One little piece 'Baka Studies' played around with some African rhythms. It was by far the best thing I had ever done, but although he said nothing negative, I could sense that it was too straight-forward for George, he called it 'cute'. For quite a few years after that I attempted to follow the path I admired rather than my own inner calling. What a paradox. One piece from that time ended with a great little interlocking hocketing groove. It sounded great, and was the moment everyone picked out from the piece - "loved that bit at the end". That was my own voice poking out, but I wasn't ready to accept it at that stage, I dismissed that moment and binned the piece. I wanted to write something that George would have called something better than 'cute'.

What George would think of what I'm doing now, I really don't know. But the important thing is, it doesn't really matter. I have to trust what I do, and what I like, follow my own path. People usually say that, meaning "even if it's so obscure no one will like it", but in my case, the bravery has come from accepting that my own path might be something that speaks much more simply and directly and that I should follow it, even if it leads me far away from people whom I still greatly admire, like George.

Around the world juggler.

I'm thankful that I seem to contradict the male stereotype of only being able to think about one thing at a time. Along side all the crazy stuff that routinely happens in my 'real' life, in my composing life I've got four pretty major projects all on the boil at the moment. Normally this would be a good time for blind panic, but somehow I feel remarkably on top of the situation.

By far the biggest committment is The Firework Maker's Daughter. This will be a full evening of music. There will definitely be a tour in spring '13, and we are still finalising whether there will be a run in Christmas '12 which hangs on a chain of other groups and committments and possibilities. Either way I plan to finish it in the early autumn of '12 and we'll probably workshop an almost finished version in May just to iron out any last kinks. Earlier in the year I set myself the target of finishing the first half in sketch form by the end of this year, and I seem to be well on the way to doing that, with just one small final scene to go. The project is exciting me more and more, I just love the story and the colours. As I write I have a friend's old saucepan hanging from the ceiling which helps remind me of the junk yard percussion idea I'm aiming to bring to at least parts of the opera. The piece also seems to be developing a fairly massive marimba part. I would love to find a chromatic marimba that has the more 'ethnic' colour of a balaphone or folk xyophone. If anyone knows of anything like that please let me know!

What else? Well there's the piece for the Silk Road Project which emerged in a sudden flurry of activity over a period of just a couple of weeks. It's diverged a bit from the direction it was taking during the period I gave this interview. I was so hoping to try something out using an arabic scale with quarter-tones (I had some great sessions with Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh to this end) but I just couldn't find a way - for now - to make them 'my own'.

But the resulting piece fits with my image of the Silk Road Project, as one giant, soulful jamboree. There are a few ideas that maybe hint at Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Southern Spain and elsewhere. In a way, I think of it a bit like the wonderful musical documentary Latcho Drom (much of which is available on YouTube) which traces the music of the gypsies from their original starting point in India through the middle east and ending with the flamenco musicians of Andalusia. I've called the piece (which is a series of four dances) Cut the Rug - which is an old phrase you say of someone who dances well.

Speaking of jamborees, what a crazy project I've landed myself with the mighty London Philharmonic Orchestra here in London. I'm to write a piece for Symphony Orchestra (the LPO), tanbur (an Iranian long-necked lute), daff (an Iranian frame drum), more daffs (possibly an ensemble of 15 daffs), 60 amateur violinists from the fantastic London Music Masters Bridge Project, a story-teller (Sally Pomme), and if we can, a spot of audience participation from the 2500+ school kids who will be packed into the Festival Hall for two consequtive days next May (part of their BrightSparks series). The story to be 'told through music' will be an excerpt from the Shahnameh, the Iranian epic poem. I'm excited because the story we've chosen features the Simorgh, whom I know from the great Persian poem The Conference of the Birds - in a nutshell, 30 birds (or 'Si Morgh') travel to find the mystical God-like bird, the Simorgh, only to find a lake and their own reflection. It's something to do with the transcendent within us all - which curiously enough is pretty much the idea behind The Firework Maker's Daughter, even if it presents itself on the surface as something much more humble. So yes..stick all that in your pipe and see what kind of smoke comes out!

Finally, there's the small matter of my piece for the 'Cultural Olympiad'. But that's easy, it only involves a fire artist, 200 choristers, a battery of horns and diverse locations around the UK which all need scouting out - a piece of cake!

Lamenting Down Under

Earlier in the year the Australian Chamber Orchestra premiered my Two Dowland Laments. The performance they gave, with Fiona Campbell singing the mezzo role, was simply ravishing, and I'm thrilled its been faithfully recorded and videoed, and is now online. Check it out:

Go Crystal Tears

Flow my tears

Interview from The Opera Group

The Opera Group posted a brief interview with me about the two projects I'm working on with them next year, so I thought I'd replicate it here. The two projects in question are Fire, commissioned as part of the 20x12 PRSF Cultural Olympiad initiative by The Opera Group and Salisbury Festival. Fire will feature choirs from festivals around the UK, including Salisbury, Brighton and Spitalfields, together with fire artists The World Famous. The second piece is the chamber opera The Firework Maker's Daughter, a co-commission with ROH2, featuring librettist Glyn Maxwell and based on the story by Philip Pullman.

What attracts you about Philip Pullman's book The Firework Maker's Daughter ?

Philip Pullman wrote that he once came across some stage designs for an old play called The Elephant of Siam or The Fire Fiend and that he was so intrigued by the title that he ended up writing this story to fit it. There was similarly an instant appeal to me in writing an opera that featured a singing elephant, a jungle and a huge firework competition. There's nothing better than an impossible challenge! The story Pullman wrote really is genius - it has the deceptively simple richness of an old folk tale, and yet its themes - the empowerment of a young girl; the challenges of growing up; the importance of friendship - seem much more relevant and less didactic than many Victorian tales.

I don't think of the piece as an 'opera for children' - call me a big child, but it's just a story I'm interested in. And in any case, I much prefer Pullman's suggestion that our aim should be to write something, about which people say "that's so good, even children will
like it".

You are also writing another piece for The Opera Group in 2012 – a collaboration with a live fire artist - Is there any links between your writing for Fire and The Firework Maker's Daughter?

It's a funny coincidence but no, there's not really a connection, other than my general interest in nature and the elements. I'm also drawn to things that in literature would be called 'magic realism' - the sort of magic and mystery found in our every day lives. There's plenty of that in The Firework Maker's Daughter; and the Fire piece seems to be turning into a kind of prayer to the mystery of fire.

Where do you write? In a garden-shed? At a computer?

I have a very cluttered room at home full of papers, scores, instruments and computer screens. I guess I use a weird mixture of hi-tech and lo-tech. I have a veritable orchestra of instruments and will often experiment on them to come up with ideas. This hands-on, physical aspect of a piece is very important to me. Other times I will get an idea while I'm out for a walk and sing it into my iPhone recording app! Alongside that I tend to write and even sketch directly
onto the computer and I really enjoy being able to chisel away like a sculptor at the structure of a piece as I hear it through the computer speakers. For all the flaws of computer-playback, this aspect really allows my imagination to soar.

Steampunk beards

It's a good job I had my Steampunk beard on for this short feature from PBS Arts. It's part of a great series filmed by kornhaberbrown called Off Book. You can listen to (or watch) an entire performance of my piece Steampunk here.

North Wind blows through London

Another delicious Chroma experience earlier in August took place at the Tete a Tete festival in Riverside Studios. This was the EU premiere of The North Wind was a Woman. Here's what the Guardian thought of it. The same show comes to Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts in November. Here's a complete video of the London performance, with Sadhbh Dennedy in the soprano role.

David Bruce: The North Wind was a Woman from david bruce on Vimeo.

Meckpomm Snaps

The premiere of The Given Note took place in the small town of Loitz, three hours north of Berlin in the former DDR. The venue was a charming and characterful old ballroom and we were told this was the first concert to have been given there in recent times. It was slightly disconcerting to arrive in a typical small town street, and be told 'this is the venue'. But through the fairly unasuming front door and up some old wooden stairs and you found yourself in an atmospheric old dance hall, the sound of long-lost dance bands lingering in the air.

Despite the off-the-beaten track location, the venue was packed with several hundred people and what seemed to be a mixture of locals, including a lot of youngsters - as well as people from further afield. The venues in the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are scattered throughout this vast region, and I was amazed to hear that people travel regularly from Berlin and Hamburg to hear festival concerts, even if it means a five or six hour round-trip. Although perhaps not so amazing when you flick through the festival brochure and read an amazing line-up of internationally renowned stars like Martha Argerich or David Finckel who attend.

This was Daniel Hope's first year as Artistic Director of the festival (he had previously run the chamber series) so it was a special privilege to have him join us and bring his superb artistry to bear on the first outing of my piece. Indeed it would be hard to better the performance, with David Orlowsky and his trio forming the rock solid core of the ensemble, and the brilliantly maverick Vincent Segal on Cello. David himself brings an incredible expressivity and rich warm tone to his performance. Having started out in klezmer music, he is now equally at home in the classical world; and the combination of those folk-musician instincts with the technical chops to handle my sometimes fiendish writing, made him a perfect match for my music. I hope I can work with him a lot more in the future.

Here are a few snaps from this great adventure:

Rehearsals start in earnest

With Daniel Hope and David Orlowsky

Vincent Segal

Tuning up just before the premier

Singing in the rain

Yesterday we had a trial run with the Salisbury Community Choir of my piece 'Fire', part of the PRSF 20x12 'Cultural Olympiad' initiative co-commissioned by Salisbury Festival and The Opera Group. Although it was an 'extra' rehearsal tagged on to the end of the choir's rehearsal season, conductor Jeremy Backhouse called a three-line whip and managed an impressive turn out of well over 100 choristers. We tried out a section of the new piece, but the main purpose was to see how things would work in the open air.

We'd spent the afternoon scouting out various locations around the city and settled provisionally on a beautiful square near the cathedral, where the sound echos off the buildings on all sides. The idea we've had in our minds is to perform the piece in a giant circle, with the audience - and some kind of fire spectacle by fire artists The World Famous in the middle. (OK I admit we haven't fully scoped the practicalities of all that just yet). The piece I think, will be a kind of homage or prayer to fire.

As the choir emerged from the rehearsal room, a few dark clouds duly gathered overhead and the first spots of rain were felt. It quickly grew to a steady drizzle and within moments, the entire choir seemed to have donned rain coats and put up umbrellas. Bulldog spirit at its finest - a little rain certainly wasn't going to stop them.

We started by testing out the choir in two clumped groups standing opposite each other (I'm writing it for 'double choir'). The effect was 'ordinary', nothing special. So then we asked them to spread into a wide circle. At first standing a meter apart (in the photo above), then even further apart.

It was trully amazing, standing in the middle of the circle, how an instant energy was created, it felt like you were part of some ancient ceremony - and when one of the choristers suggested we should wear druid-like robes for the performance, I could see it wasn't just me that felt that. Once they started singing, Patrick from The Opera Group looked over to me, and we both knew without saying anything that this really was the way to go. You found yourself moving your eye and ear around the circle, in front behind, constantly surprised by the moving focus of sound. It was a delight! I can only guess how exciting it will become with the addition of the fire and all the other elements in place. Something to look forward to, come rain or shine!

Double vision

Earlier in the year I was in San Diego for the premiere of my flute/harp/viola trio, The Eye of Night. I'm pretty thrilled that six months later the piece has already been taken up by The Aoyama Trio in London, who will give the European premiere at The Forge, Camden this Thursday (Come!) with a repeat performance at the National Portrait Gallery on 26th August; and on the other side of the pond, The Myriad Trio, who commissioned and premiered the piece, are gearing up to record the piece for their (and my) first CD release.

Piosenki at Ojai

Dawn Upshaw is artistic director of the Ojai Festival in California this year, and she's kindly programmed songs from my Piosenki for a concert called 'Dawn Upshaw's Voices:Next Generation ', featuring some of her talented students from Bard College, NY (where my opera A Bird in Your Ear was premiered).

Details of the festival here

Carved in Stone

Here are some reviews of my recent US performances:

North Wind was a Woman
Art of Elan Gives Local Premiere of David Bruce Song Cycle (SanDiego.com)

The Shadow of the blackbird
Music review: Jacobsen and Levingston at Library of Congress (Washington Post)

A Little Offbeat Humor in Cyclical Explorations (NY Times)

Songs in Wood
The Man Who Makes a Marimba Into a Strad (concertonet.com)

While I was in the states someone pointed out that it was the 10th anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams (of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame). Someone else pointed me to this rather wonderful article Adams wrote on the internet and technology, which contains many pearls of wisdom, including this sage advice which applies as much to reviews as it does to anything else you read in a newspaper:

"Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back � like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust � of course you can't, it's just people talking � but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV � a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'."

Forthcoming premieres & performances

Unfortunately I won't be able to make an exciting event on May 3rd which is the West Coast premiere of The North Wind was a Woman, performed by the fantastic Art of Elan (who recently premiered The Eye of Night) with Susan Narucki singing.

I will however be in New York and Washington for the premieres of two new pieces, my new piano piece for Bruce Levingston, The Shadow of the Blackbird, which premieres in the Library of Congress on 6th May, with a repeat performance at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on 12th May (tickets here).

The second premiere is a new piece for Choir and Marimba, featuring Cantori New York and Makoto Nakura (tickets here). The piece is called Songs in Wood and features texts by yours truly. It forms part of a trilogy of new commissions, the other two being by Jacob Bancks and Akemi Naito.

Silk Road Project Interview

Here's a brief interview I did with Silk Road Project about the new piece I'm writing for them.

The origins of the dance

The inspiration behind my clarinet quintet Gumboots was the story of the South African miners whose ebullient gumboot dancing emerged from the bleak conditions of mining under apartheid. I suspect there may be many other similar stories of something good and life-affirming emerging out of something much darker.

At a recent performance of Gumboots by the great musical asset of the North East of England, Ensemble 360 I got talking to a lady who had come specially to hear the piece, (having youtube'd it beforehand!) and she told me that the story of gumboot dancing sounded similar to one she had been told about in her salsa classes. From what I can see online, she may have been talking about the Merengue, whose shuffling steps are not hard to imagine originating in chained feet.

It is hard to be sure though, perhaps in this case it's just a modern myth - another popular story of the origin of the dance claims that a great hero was wounded in the leg during one of the many revolutions in the Dominican Republic. A party of villagers welcomed him home with a victory celebration and, out of sympathy, everyone dancing felt obliged to limp and drag one foot.

Either way, it's nice to sense these dances stretching back over the decades and centuries, to feel the continuity, and to sense the passion, resilience and spirit of people who dance away their troubles.

Steampunk at WQXR's Green Space

Steampunk will get a repeat outing at WQXR's Green Space in NYC tomorrow with ACJW performing. The performance at 7.30pm will be broadcast on WQXR and also have a live video webcast on wqxr.org and on the NPR website.

More details here: http://www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace/events/2011/apr/05/ensemble-acjw/

Making arrangements


Australian Chamber Orchestra	Mark Mandarano of Sinfonietta of Riverdale

There's something quite relaxing about making arrangements. Tidying up the final orchestration is always one of my favourite parts of the composing process, and doing an arrangement feels like composing, but with all the hard work removed.

This month the Australian Chamber Orchestra is touring a concert curated by the celebrated New Yorker critic Alex Ross which features a newly commissioned arrangement by me of two of John Dowland's laments, featuring mezzo Fiona Campbell. The show was to have played at the Sydney Opera House, which I was pretty excited about, but due to some last minute availability crises it will now get two outings at Sydney's City Recital Hall instead, as well as performances in Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.

And for the 13th May, my friend Mark Mandarano has commissioned a new arrangement of Ravel's insanely beautiful Kaddisch (from Deux m�lodies h�bra�ques) for his flourishing bronx-based ensemble, Sinfonietta of Riverdale.

Later in the year I'm also doing some new arrangements of Irish folk songs, together with a brand new commission for a stella line-up of musicians - clarinettist David Orlowsky and his trio, violinist Daniel Hope, and cellist Vincent Segal. That forms part of a program at the Mecklenburg Vorpommern festival in Northern Germany. More on that later.