Posted by Please join the CUCL on Friday, June 8th for a meet and greet with renowned composer and Columbia alumnus, Nico Muhly (CC '03), followed by a performance at the Barbican's LSO St. Luke's.
Arts Access Extra - Nico will join us for a quick hello (and drinks on us!) before the performance at a nearby venue. We will meet at 6pm, and walk over to the performance, which starts at 8pm. Details will be confirmed to ticket holders closer to the date.
Ticket sales end on June 6th, book now to avoid disappointment!!
Program
The live iteration of a highly anticipated collaboration between Thomas Bartlett, also known as Doveman, and contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly, their forthcoming record Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music (Nonesuch Records, Spring 2018) will be performed in its entirety at LSO St Luke’s on Friday 8 June.
Ten years in the making, this recording was born from a love of Colin McPhee’s (1900-1964) transcriptions of Balinese ceremonial music for two pianos. The dual pianos translate the complicated overlapping patterns of gamelan music into a stylised, Western approximation. McPhee lived, in 1940, with the composer Benjamin Britten, his partner Peter Pears, W.H. Auden and other artists.
McPhee and Britten recorded the suite in 1941, and while the recording’s audio quality is dated, it is evocative and points towards the music Britten wrote before his death in 1976. Bartlett and Muhly decided to write a set of nine songs loosely based on the textures and interlocking rhythms from McPhee’s transcriptions, as well as the various resonant sounds from Balinese music, but consolidated into their own stylised processes.