Embracing the overlaps between music, opera, the visual arts, performance and the moving image, this 11th edition of the London Contemporary Music festival promises to present an adventurous programme full of brand new work and surprises. Within the richly-packed line up, which will keep punters busy for the first half of December, are premieres by two Edition Peters composers, Rebecca Saunders and Carola Bauckholt.
On Decemeber 4, Bauckholt, one of Germany’s great mavericks, presents her new work Talking Minerals, overloading the ensemble The Flautadors with over 20 recorders, of different shapes and sizes, in a wheezy, bendy anti-tour-de-force. The concert will take place at 180 box, in the 180 studios on the Strand.
4 Dec: Things Fall Apart - LCMF
A few days later on December 7, in a concert titled 'Fevers', we hear the London Premiere of Saunders' 2021 work Us Dead Talk Love for alto voice and ensemble. On their website, the LCMF say about the work:
"Very little music comes as close to the fever-dream state as that of the British composer Rebecca Saunders. In Us Dead Talk Love, sound and word becomes fleshy, the text A Primer for Cadavers by artist Ed Atkins – ‘a stream of conciousness which is at times palpable, close, intimate and dauntingly present’ (Saunders) – worming its way into the voice of Noa Frankel and the musicians of Ensemble Nikel like a kind of virus, infecting them, pushing them into ever more heightened, hallucinatory worlds. LCMF presents the London premiere."
