JUDITH WEIR: TELLING THE TALE
Music, Talks, Films and Free Events |
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 Sunday 20 January
11.00am Film
Cinema 2, Level 4
Scipio’s Dream
Scipio’s Dream, written in collaboration with Margaret Williams for BBC TV’s Not Mozart series in 1991, tells of office-bound Scipio. His daily grind is transformed when two colleagues abandon the photocopier to become the goddesses Fortune and Constancy. Does he follow Fortune’s line of chance or Constancy’s plea for dutiful service? The choice takes Scipio on a fizzing journey of self-discovery.
UK, 1991, Dir. Margaret Williams 30mins
plus
Armida
Weir’s most recent Williams collaboration, Armida, was created for Channel 4 in 2005. Its 430-year-old source, Torquato Tasso’s tale of the pacifist knight Rinaldo and his love for the sorceress Armida, is here updated to explore present realities of war and peace.
UK, 2005, Dir. Margaret Williams 50mins
2.00pm Concert
Jerwood Hall, LSO St Lukes
Songs and Tales
JUDITH WEIR Songs from the Exotic; On buying a horse; Scotch Minstrelsy; Ständchen; The Voice of Desire; Ox Mountain Was Covered by Trees
Plus songs by Howells, Britten, Haydn Wood, Scott and Grainger and Butterworth arrangements
Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano
Andrew Kennedy tenor
Iain Burnside piano
Songs and their role in story-telling have supplied Judith Weir with brimming reservoirs of creative ideas. She recalls that, while writing the songs in this unmissable recital, 'I felt I was taking a holiday from the world of new music to practise an ancient craft'. Her vacation destinations explore everything from the timeless Chinese wisdom of Ox Mountain Was Covered by Trees to the instantly gripping folk poetry of Serbia, heard in the exquisite Songs from the Exotic. Honest peasant advice leaps irresistibly from On buying a horse – poorly marked animals, the song tells us, should be skinned and fed to the crows!
4.30pm Concert
LSO St Luke's, Jerwood Hall
Woman.Life.Song
Guildhall Chamber Orchestra
André de Ridder conductor
Edward Pick piano
Soloists from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama vocal department
JUDITH WEIR Piano Concerto
JUDITH WEIR woman.life.song
With its lucid simplicity and clearly defined themes, Weir’s Piano Concerto speaks with the concentrated focus of the finest folk-tales and the force of the best of romantic chamber pieces. The work, written for William Howard and the Schubert Ensemble, confounds expectations, favouring expressive intimacy above display. Yet its effect is emotionally powerful, not least thanks to the composer’s imaginative use of the English folksong ‘The sweet primeroses’. The idea for woman.life.song was hatched for performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall by Jessye Norman, who commissioned poems from Maya Angelou, Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Toni Morrison for this song-cycle tracing a woman’s life from infancy to old age.
6.30pm Talk
Barbican Hall
Judith Weir in conversation with Christopher Cook.
Admission free to ticket-holders for the evening concert
7.00pm Free Event
Barbican Foyer,
Chamber Music Installation
The music of Judith Weir will ring out from every corner of the Barbican as young musicians from the BBC SO’s partner organisations gather together to perform a specially written overture by Judith Weir before spreading out across the Barbican foyers to perform duos, trios, quartets and other chamber music by Weir and finally reuniting for a magnificent coda.
Free event
8.00pm Concert, Barbican Hall
Earth and Sky
JUDITH WEIR Moon and Star
MICHAEL FINNISSY Red Earth
JUDITH WEIR Concrete (BBC commission: world premiere)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins conductor
Samuel West narrator
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
Traces of past inhabitants, forgotten civilisations and meaningful remains surface in Concrete, a sensational new work exploring our lives amid the ruins of times past. Judith Weir’s composition, specially commissioned for Judith Weir: Telling the Tale, is subtitled ‘a motet about London’ and described as ‘an imaginary excavation of the Barbican Centre, burrowing through 2,500 years of historical rubble’. Judith Weir is a huge admirer of the music of Michael Finnissy, whose work with folkloristic traditions has had a profound influence on her work and his Red Earth is performed tonight. Judith Weir’s Moon and Star, written for the 1995 BBC Proms, melds the sounds of large orchestra with chorus, its ideas directly inspired by the shimmering imagery of Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Ah, Moon and Star!’
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