ROSS EDWARDS - 2007 NEWS

Newly released CDs include More Marimba Dances,  Symphony No. 4 (Star Chant) and Symphony No. 1 (Da Pacem Domine).

Festivals and Tours – Musica Viva Australia, Glamorgan Festival, Wales, and The Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival, Arizona.

Premier Performances include a string quartet and a clarinet concerto.

More information below

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NEW CD RELEASES

Star Chant is out at last from ABC Classics!

The long awaited CD of Ross Edwards' epic 4^th Symphony ‘Star Chant' is now available in combination with a beautiful new recording of his 1^st Symphony ‘Da Pacem Domine'. (Scores of both these works are available for hire from Ricordi London www.ricordi.co.uk )

‘Star Chant', premiered to great acclaim at the 2002 Adelaide Festival, was composed in collaboration with astronomer Fred Watson, who provided the text, and deep space photographer David Malin, whose images accompanied the first performance. Fred Watson writes:

This musical fusion of art and science represents a journey through Australia's night skies. It celebrates the stars in western and aboriginal culture with names taken from both ancient European legend and the Dreamtime stories of many different indigenous peoples.

Star Chant - Ross Edwards
Adelaide Chamber Singers and the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus

Music CD

Pre-order now available 7 July 2007
$29.95

 

Two majestic pieces by Australian composer Ross Edwards are presented on this new album. Da pacem Domine is a prayer for peace, grounded in human ritual, whereas Star Chant reflects the eternal grandeur of the night sky and includes a chorus singing the names of the celestial features in various Aboriginal languages. Performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra with the Adelaide Chamber Singers and the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus conducted by Richard Mills, both pieces will leave you contemplating the nature of our existence.

Track Listing

• Symphony No. 1 'Da pacem Domine'
• Symphony No. 4 'Star Chant'

Released: 2007

ISBN / Catalogue Number: 4766161

 

More Marimba Dances out now on CD from Tall Poppies Records and performing score to be released soon by Ricordi London.

In 1982 Ross Edwards composed his Marimba Dances, a set of three light-hearted but virtuosic pieces for solo marimba which was taken up by such performers as Michael Askill and Evelyn Glennie and quickly entered the world repertoire. By now it has become a classic and is considered an indispensable test piece for the instrument.

 

Twenty years later, the Australian percussionist Claire Edwardes suggested that it was time Ross Edwards composed some more marimba pieces. More Marimba Dances, in the same buoyant vein as the earlier set, was commissioned by Terry and Greg Chesher, to whom it is dedicated. Claire Edwardes gave the first performance at a Musica Viva Australia concert on 31 March 2004 at the Arthouse Hotel, Sydney.

 

The first recording is now available from Tall Poppies and the score is being prepared for publication by Ricordi London www.ricordi.uk

Both can be ordered from the Australian Music Centre info@amcoz.com.au

< TP192   TP193   TP194 >  TP (1-200)   TP193 Coil Claire Edwardes percussion $23   (Australian dollars)     (buy now at buywell.com)   Claire Edwardes has been making a mark on the Australian contemporary music landscape since winning the ABC's Young Performer of the Year in 1999 and the prestigious Freedman Fellowship in 2005. She has returned from studies and performances in Europe and is now involved in several new music ensembles in Australia as well as establishing herself as a soloist. This is her debut solo CD, and sparkles with the energy and vitality that characterise her live performances. The centrepiece of the repertoire Claire has chosen for this recording is Ross Edwards' More Marimba Dances. His earlier Marimba Dances has become one of the world's most-played and most-loved percussion works. This second work contains all the qualities that made the earlier piece such a favourite with both performers and audiences alike. CONTENTS Gerard Brophy Coil Ross Edwards More Marimba Dances Damien Ricketson Hol-Spannen-Luiden Dominik Karski Beginnings to no End Andrew Schultz Winter Ground Andrew Ford The Armed Man Mark Pollard Just a Moment One Sweet Moment

 

        2007 MUSICA VIVA TOURS

As Musica Viva Australia's Featured Composer for 2007, many performances of Ross Edwards' chamber works have been scheduled. In May and June, his string octet Veni Creator Spiritus was toured nationally by a combination of the Australian String Quartet and the visiting Jerusalem String Quartet. Forthcoming tours by pianist Stephen Hough (Sept./Oct.), the Choir of Westminster Abbey (Oct.) and the Brentano String Quartet (Nov.) will also feature Edwards works, including the premiere of his new String Quartet ‘Sparks and Auras' by the Brentano Quartet (see note below).

For details www.musicaviva.com.au

 

 

2007 GLAMORGAN FESTIVAL

News from Ricordi London www.ricordi.uk

 

              Ross Edwards – Featured at Vale of Glamorgan Festival

 

Australian Ross Edwards' music will be featured again at the Vale of Glamorgan this September, with a variety of solo, chamber and orchestral works being performed.  Edwards' music was first introduced to the festival's audiences in 2002, and this year his works range from White Cockatoo Dance, for solo violin, to Binyang for clarinet and percussion, to a performance by BBC NOW of White Ghost Dancing, for orchestra and Bird Spirit Dreaming,  for oboe and orchestra.

 

The UK premiere of Edwards' a cappella choral work, Mountain Chant – Three Sacred Choruses, will end the festival, performed by Tenebrae, conducted by Nigel Short.

 

The festival takes place in various venues in the Vale of Glamorgan, from Tuesday 4^th September to Saturday 8th September. www.valeofglamorganfestival.org

 

 

 

TUCSON WINTER CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL, ARIZONA, MARCH 2008

arizonachambermusic.org/welcome.htm

 

Ross Edwards' music will be featured at the 2008 Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival in Arizona. Among other works, a festival commission will have its world premiere, performed by William Barton, didjeridu, Synergy Percussion Quartet, and a string quartet made up of Ian Swenson and Lara St. John, violins, Paul Coletti, viola and Antonio Lypsy, cello. The new work, provisionally titled Tucson Mantras, will conclude the festival, which will open with Tyalgum Mantras (1999).

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TWO WORLD PREMIER PERFORMANCES

CLARINET CONCERTO

 

Ross Edwards has completed a new clarinet concerto for the Melbourne Symphony's Principal Clarinettist, David Thomas. David will give the world first performance on 30 November 2007 by the MSO and its Chief Conductor, Maestro Oleg Caetani. For details www.mso.com.au

 

Ross has provided the following note:

 

Clarinet Concerto (2006-7)

in a single movement

                                                                                                                  Ross Edwards

 

Returning to Australia thirty-five years ago from studies in Europe, I was entranced by sounds of the natural environment - nocturnal insects and frogs and later birdsong and cicadas - which seeped into my subconscious and emerged as the defining elements of my music. A radical stylistic change later galvanized them into dance rhythms and  pungent melodic shapes and gestures distilled from birdsong. These gradually became, for me, indispensable symbols.

 

As my at first very spare musical language began to expand, musical

techniques and devices  implied by the material gleaned from nature began to appear – universal ones such as drones and others, more sophisticated and tinged with a diversity of cultural associations:  gamelan textures, plainsong, a constant interchange of various Asian and mediaeval European modes, didjeridu references and increasingly elaborate counterpoint. The result, in my dance-chant or maninya music, is an obsessive, kaleidoscopic interplay of symbolically charged fragments – a sort of Australian dervish dance in which my aim has been to suspend awareness of linear time and plunge the listener into present-centered consciousness. This has been an important function of music throughout the ages.

 

My Clarinet Concerto, composed especially for David Thomas and the Melbourne Symphony, fully exploits these techniques. It is at the same time a work of great contrasts in which vivid presences and dreamlike distances are juxtaposed with the intention of keeping listeners alert and engaged. It opens with phrases from the plainsong Ave Maria Gratia Plena (Hail Mary, full of Grace), fragments of which reappear in many guises throughout the work as a symbol of the universal Earth Mother, source and nurturer of all living things. The ecological association will become audible as plainsong turns dramatically into birdsong. Three movements are performed without interruption. Two of them are explosive dances, headlong, exuberant, but with episodes of nimbleness and translucent delicacy – a flash of coloured bird wing, a hovering dragonfly, a shriek of parrots. At the core of the work, an intricate melodic line evolves slowly over drones that anchor it to the earth.

 

I gratefully acknowledge that my Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Justice Alan Goldberg AO, in memory of his parents, Margery and Geoffrey Goldberg and his sister Jenny Goldberg.

 

Ross Edwards.

 

 

 

SPARKS AND AURAS for String Quartet

On 30 November 2007, the Brentano String Quartet will premiere Ross Edwards' new string quartet in the City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, and tour it around Australia. For details: www.musicaviva.com.au

 

Ross has provided the following note:

 

Sparks and Auras (2005-6)

for string quartet

I seem to have reached an age at which the various compositional paths I've explored over the years are beginning to merge and the disparate components of my language come together in ways that I would once have thought unimaginable. This subconscious process of integration has been gathering momentum for some time now. It's particularly evident in the texture of my new string quartet, Sparks and Auras, where an almost kaleidoscopic interplay of allusive cultural material has been assimilated and interfused with sounds and patterns subconsciously gleaned from the natural world. These diverse fragments interact and form associations and interdependencies not unlike organisms within an ecosystem. Some of them, which have been recurring throughout my music for years, have become deeply symbolic. There are fleeting references to one of the Christian Mary chants, for example, which I associate with the universal Earth Mother and the survival of life on the planet; and I've long sought to capture the passionate flame of present-centeredness that is a feature of Sufi ritual music. I suppose this repository of associations woven into a complex whole reflects my yearning for a tolerant multicultural society in tune with the natural environment.

There are three contrasting movements which have some interconnecting links. The first is mainly very animated and quite contrapuntally developmental. It grows from a lyrical, somewhat wistful pentatonic cello melody which functions as a ritornello - with some transformation and tempo fluctuation - throughout the movement, and this is associated with the Mary chant. The general tone is ardent, searing and there are sudden dramatic contrasts.

The second movement is stark, interior, with strands of fragile birdsong in the first violin over drones that symbolize a mysterious void. The cello enters - a calm human voice which later joins the violin in passionate dialogue before dissolving into a spectral miniature scherzo and returning to the mood of the opening. The work concludes with a robustly impulsive maninya, or dance-chant, which celebrates the earth.

I'm most grateful to Julian Burnside for commissioning this work for Musica Viva Australia and the Brentano String Quartet.

Ross Edwards.