Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Music. There were times during my long weekend at this year’s HCMF when i had to keep reminding myself of this word. Performance art, and works incorporating dramatic and theatrical elements, are not just a staple of new music festivals, they’ve become in many cases tentpole …
Laura Bowler
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The opportunity to hear two new works by Laura Bowler within a single week isn’t just a exciting prospect, it’s a daunting one. Her subject matter has oscillated between the personal and the global, at both extremes seeking to address the pain and damage that far too many people are …
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To bring this year’s nature-focused Lent Series to a close, i’m turning to a major work by British composer Laura Bowler. Antarctica is a 50-minute multimedia piece for voice and orchestra that constitutes a very personal, and very passionate, response to a variety of issues affecting the natural world. As …
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Having heard Thomas Lehn’s live rendition of Bogusław Schaeffer’s 1964 Symphony last thing on Thursday night, it couldn’t have been more perfect to have started Friday in the company of four more Polish electronic works, dating from around a decade later. Eugeniusz Rudnik‘s Ready Made (1977) took a collage approach to found sounds, …
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PremièresValentine Weekend
Valentine Weekend: Laura Bowler – Irresistible Demands of the Flesh (World Première)
by 5:4To bring this inverted Valentine Weekend to an end, i’m turning from the intimacy of duets to the large-scale, inflamed overload of the orchestra. Laura Bowler‘s Irresistible Demands of the Flesh is an audacious exploration in sound of the theatrical tenets of Antonin Artaud, specifically the desire to push performers …