The Cool Web : A Robert Graves Oratorio

Tag: Endymion

Introducing… Endymion.. the orchestra of The Cool Web

Endymion playing in a Steve Reich concert at the Proms, 2014

“The brilliant Endymion” (Sunday Times) exists to deliver world-class performances of chamber music throughout London, the UK and abroad. It nurtures the UK’s most dynamic and original composers, inspire younger and new audiences and champions mixed chamber music of all genres, through performance, commissioning, recording and promotion.

Since Endymion was formed in 1979 from a group of outstanding National Youth Orchestra students, it has built a secure reputation across a broad and often adventurous repertoire and won a strong following among audiences throughout the UK and abroad, touring in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Finland and Mexico. Unusually for chamber groups so well established, Endymion retains most of its original players. These performers now number among the best soloists and chamber musicians in Europe, including Mark van de Wiel, Stephen Stirling, Melinda Maxwell, Michael Dussek and Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE. Performing together for over thirty years, Endymion has been called one of the few chamber groups as much at home with Mozart as with Birtwistle.

Endymion has made a speciality of 20th century music theatre and chamber opera, including collaborations with the Royal Opera House’s Garden Venture, Women’s Playhouse Trust and Opera Factory, with which it undertook a European tour of Dido and Aeneas and Curlew River in 1995.

Endymion has appeared at most of the major British festivals, including nine times at the Proms, and was in residence at Blackheath Concert Halls for several years. Recent appearances at Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Kings Place and at the Cheltenham and Spitalfields Festivals have included works by Kurtag, Simon Holt and Simon Bainbridge, premières by Vic Hoyland, Philip Cashian and Brian Elias and an Elisabeth Lutyens portrait concert. A retrospective of Anthony Gilbert’s music featured a dozen especially composed musical tributes by distinguished contemporaries, including Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Colin Matthews and Anthony Payne. Endymion’s collaborations with the BBC Singers have included world premières of Giles Swayne’s Havoc (Proms, 1999) and Edward Cowie’s Gaia (2003), as well as the UK première of Birtwistle’s Ring Dance of the Nazarene at the 2004 Proms (“startling virtuosity from all concerned” – Daily Telegraph)

A particularly successful (and much imitated) innovation is the wide-ranging series of Composer Choice concerts staged by Endymion at the Southbank, which have included Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen, Gavin Bryars, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Judith Weir, John Woolrich and Michael Berkeley.

In June 2009 Endymion celebrated its 30th Birthday at Kings Place with the Sound Census festival. Alongside a celebration of classical chamber music repertoire, 20 British composers were commissioned to write new works for Endymion. These were recorded for release by NMC Recordings. This disc will join a host of other recordings by Endymion including works by Lutyens, Stravinsky, Britten and Magnus Lindberg and (with the Dutton label) York Bowen, Edmund Rubbra, Thomas Dunhill, Lennox Berkeley, Erno Dohnanyi and Zdenek Fibich.

In 2011, a major collaboration with EXAUDI vocal ensemble included performances at Southbank Centre, Sound Festival Scotland and Wigmore Hall, (where Endymion will be returning next year as part of the Wigmore series), the premieres of four new commissioned works by young British and Irish composers, and programmes focusing on Morton Feldman and Arvo Pärt. 2011 also featured Goodbye Stalin! – a three-day festival of chamber music by Shostakovich and Schnittke at King’s Place – and the UK premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Quintet.

In February 2014 Endymion celebrated its 35th Birthday at Kings Place with a weekend of concerts focused on Brahms chamber music for wind and strings, as well as a programme of music for flute, viola and harp. Two of these concerts were part of the “Top 50 Chamber Classics Unwrapped” series, presenting favourite works voted for by readers of BBC Music Magazine.

Endymion’s wide range, its genuine enthusiasm for the work of new composers combined with its irreproachable understanding of the classical repertoire, makes it the perfect ensemble to premiere The Cool Web.

Endymion performing Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet at Kings Place in 2009

a powerful sense of energy and mystery ‘ – The Daily Telegraph

October 10, 2014
Introducing – The Melody Makers of Bath Abbey – the children singing in ‘The Cool Web’

The Melody Makers of Bath Abbey

We are delighted to introduce the performers who will sing the parts written for children’s voices in The Cool Web.

Their presence is very important to us, and central to the narrative of the oratorio, which not only focuses on the journey from the vivid responses of youth to the wariness of experience, but also returns again and again to both the joys and the nightmares of childhood.

Robert Graves, like so many of his contemporaries in the trenches, was only 19 when he arrived on the Somme; the memories of childhood were not far behind him, and a natural source of emotional reference for his poetry.

The Melody Makers will be singing in very distinguished company; under the baton of Robin O’Neill, they will join Endymion, Philharmonia Voices, and soloist Edward Grint in the first ensemble ever to perform this vibrant and exciting new oratorio.

We are so grateful to them for joining us; we know they will add that final touch of enchantment to what promises to be an exhilarating evening.

The Melody Makers were founded in January 2011 by Bath Abbey’s Assistant Director of Music, Shean Bowers. The group has grown consistently over the years and now has forty members from all over the city who regularly meet for music, song and friendship.

The choir sing a lively and varied repertoire which is accessible to all and always enjoyed by both the children singing it and those listening to it.

As well as one-off performances during the year, the youngsters also give a number of regular concerts, including a slot at the opening of Party in the City, they always turn out to give a warming rendition of carols at the Christmas market and never fail to delight at the Carols for Choir and Audience in the Abbey, where they get to sing alongside the Girls’ and Boys’ choirs too.

Shean Bowers with the Melody Makers

The group have travelled a fair amount in their short history, singing in places such as Salisbury and Gloucester Cathedrals and Stroud Town hall, as well as lending their voices to various performances, including Carmina Burana, Britten’s Friday Afternoons and even appearing BBC Radio 4.

Many of the children will go on to join the Bath Abbey Girls’ and Boys’ choirs when their time as a Melody Maker comes to an end, and it’s with great joy that we help them develop their singing to a point where this is achievable.

We can’t wait to hear them.

September 9, 2014
Introducing Robin O’Neill, The Conductor of ‘The Cool Web’

Robin O’Neill at the Wimbledon festival

As the time for the actual performance of the Oratorio grows near, we want to celebrate the people involved with the first performance of this new work.

Robin O’Neill has been part of this project from the very beginning.

Robin knew of Jools’ music from his sound-track to The Door, a short film by Andrew Steggall,

<a href="http://joolsscottmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-door-original-sound-track">The Door – Original Sound Track by Jools Scott | Composer</a>

Andrew with Charles Dance, who starred in ‘The Door’

who directed The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic, (stay with me here)

The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic

for which Robin directed the music.

Commenting on Robin O’Neill’s work as music director of The Soldier’s Tale (in a European/Iraqi collaboration which took him to Baghdad in Sept 2005 and then on a two week run at the Old Vic Theatre) the late Sir Charles Mackerras said “I would like to congratulate Robin O’Neill on his marvellous conducting of the whole ensemble, whether European or Iraqi. I particularly admired the fact that a great deal of the Stravinsky seemed to be played from memory. This in itself is a tremendous feat!”

Iraqi musicians in The Soldier’s Tale

We met to discuss the project over lunch in London at the point where we had a rough idea of the libretto, but had written none of the music at all. Robin’s enthusiasm and genuine interest was one of the spurs which turned a good idea into a real piece of work.

Since then he has stayed faithfully with it, consulting on the score, pointing us in the direction of the right orchestra, Endymion, and the Philharmonia Voices, whose work he knows through his own long association with them, and now conducting it at Bath Abbey eighteen months after our first meeting.

The Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall

In the past few seasons Robin O’Neill has conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus (with whom he gave the orchestra’s first performance in London’s newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall), London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Nordic Chamber Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Bogota Philharmonic, Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa Japan, Orchestra Cittaperta and the Orchestras of the Guildhall School of Music, Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, where he is professor of conducting.

Robin O’Neill’s conducting has been praised for it’s balance of intellectual rigour, immaculate line and visceral excitement. A performance of the Sibelius 7th Symphony prompted one reviewer to note that “he obtained a rock-like stability to the tonal structure that underpins the disturbances, thereby creating a symphonic statement both powerful and concise.”

Matthew Rye in the Daily Telegraph has commented: “Robin O’Neill conducted them (London Philharmonic) in sleek, suave performances where phrases were ideally shaped and balance nigh perfect” and the Financial Times has commented that: “Robin O’Neill conducted the brilliant Philharmonia Orchestra in faultless up-tempo style.”

Stephan Kovacevich

Robin O’Neill has collaborated with musicians such as Mikhail Pletnev, Boris Berezovsky, Mitsuko Uchida, Christoph Eschenbach, Pascal Roge, Stephen Kovacevich, Alexander Madzar, Pinchas Zuckerman, Salvatore Accardo, Isabelle Faust, Gautier Capucon, Michael Collins, Alina Ibragimova, the Lars Jansson Jazz Trio and actors such as Jeremy Irons, Julian Glover, Paul McGann and Hugh Dancy. He has also performed by invitation for His Royal Highness Prince Charles the Prince of Wales.

Jeremy Irons, who read the soldier in the first production of ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ Andrew Steggall directed at the Old Vic

Robin O’Neill regularly broadcasts on the BBC and has also had concerts broadcast on Swedish Radio, South African Radio and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. He has made two CDs with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra on the Hyperion Label.

In his parallel career, Robin O’Neill is principal bassoonist with the Philharmonia Orchestra and has held the same position with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the English Chamber Orchestra. He is a member of London Winds and the Gaudier Ensemble.

He is a Grammy nominated recording artist and has recorded virtually the whole of the core chamber music repertoire with more than 40 CDs to his name on labels such as Hyperion, Chandos, Decca and Philips.

Robin O’Neill is an Honorary Associate and Visiting Professor of Bassoon at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has coached bassoon and wind sections for several summer festivals including Canton International Summer Music Orchestra in China, the Lindenbaum Festival in South Korea and the Adam Mickiewicz Iculture Orchestra in Poland.

And now, what an immense privilege it is to have him shaping and conducting the first performance of The Cool Web.

Don’t miss it.

September 6, 2014