I am very excited to announce that I have been commissioned to write a new piece for soprano Heloise Werner and pianist Natalie Burch which will tour around the UK in late 2019/early 2020. The piece will sit alongside Britten’s Les Illuminations as well as a new piece by Heloise. I have worked with Heloise many times over the past few years both with The Hermes Experiment and as a solo artist, including the solo opera Scenes from the End in 2016, and it’s an absolute thrill to be able to do so again and explore a more theatrical approach to song. Full details of where you can hear the piece will be posted on this site closer to the time. We are very grateful for the generous support of the Hinrischen Foundation for this project.

On Thursday 23rd May my new piece Cantata-Roundelay, for soprano, tenor and cello, will be premiered at the Wigmore Hall. The concert is part of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Voiceworks project, featuring collaborations between writers, composers and singers. The text for Cantata-Roundelay was written by Sophie Rashbrook, and the piece will be performed by soprano Hannah Thomas, tenor Joseba Ceberio Gonzalez, and cellist Leo Popplewell. The concert begins at 1pm, and you can find more details here.

I have some exciting projects coming up for 2019, including taking part in the London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik Scheme, which will involve writing a brand new piece for the orchestra. I am also currently working on a new piece for Soprano, Tenor and Cello to be premiered at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday 23rd May, setting a newly-written text by Sophie Rashbrook. Check back for more information about each of these projects later this year.

You can now listen to recordings of three of my latest pieces, Trio-Sinfonie, SEXTET and Frammenti Ricercati online here. Each of these pieces explores the relationship between the fragmentary and the continuous in different ways, putting fragments as short as 10 seconds alongside continuous passages of up to 10 minutes.

Following the world premiere at the Liszt Academy in Budapest on 12th November, my Trio-Sinfonie will receive its UK premiere at Milton Court Concert Hall, London at 7:00pm on Friday 30th November. The 14-minute piece plays with proportion and continuity to create what could be described as a “broken structure”, and its compositional language is inclusive, letting in many of musical loves. The programme also features a new piece by Péter Tornyai along side music by Mozart and Smetana, and you can find more information here.

My new song for Tenor and Piano, “Dream”, setting a poem by Vahagn Davtian, will be premiered by Berj Karazian and Arpine Kalinina at the Komitas Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia on Friday 19th October. I am thrilled to have had the chance to work with Berj and Arpine again after last year’s project with the British Embassy, and though I won’t be able to attend this time, I know that they’ll give a great performance. You can hear my previous piece for them, Imaginary Lover, here. “Dream” will be available to listen to online shortly after the premiere.

I am pleased to say that SEXTET (“Lump of Love”) will be receiving its London premiere at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Wednesday 11th July. I will conduct players from the School as part of the summer New Music Society concert, starting at 8pm in the Silk Street Music Hall. The piece was commissioned by Patrick Bailey and Kevos, and premiered by them in Cornwall earlier this year. The programme note is as follows:

SEXTET lasts about 20 minutes. The piece is a combination of short or extremely short fragments with more continuous, forward-driven passages, all using the same musical material. In this sense we hear the material “said” in many different ways and on many different timescales. The main musical motto of the piece, which the clarinet plays at the start, is based on a phrase from the Joni Mitchell song “Both Sides, Now”, and the rest of the piece lets an array of different musical styles and allusions into its DNA, from Mahler to Meat Loaf. I found the subtitle, “Lump of Love”, in Joyce’s Ulysses, where its meaning is, unsurprisingly, somewhat layered. I’ve used it for its sonorous quality and its evocative ambiguity. Make of it what you will.