Music Sales composers are well represented at the BBC Proms 2009 with premieres of all kinds - BBC commissions, Proms in the Albert Hall and Proms Chamber Music concerts at Cadogan Hall. Philip Glass and Michael Nyman receive their Proms debuts; Peter Maxwell Davies celebrates his birthday with a Prom concert and further performances; John McCabe and his seventieth birthday year continues to be highlighted by the BBC with two concerts, and further premieres can be heard of music by Richard Rodney Bennett and Augusta Read Thomas.
Music Sales New Music Highlights:
Prom 13, July 26
Richard Rodney Bennett
Lilliburlero Variations
World Premiere of orchestral version
Prom 70, September 8
Peter Maxwell Davies
Violin Concerto No 2
UK Premiere
Jean Sibelius
Symphony No 5 in E flat Major
Long a resident of the Orkney Islands, the Master of The Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, celebrates his 75th birthday on September 8 by conducting Mendelssohn's sea-sprayed Hebridean overture and the UK premiere of his own new violin concerto, inspired by traditional Orkney folk and fiddle music. It was written for tonight's soloist, Daniel Hope, and commissioned by Mendelssohn's old orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with which they give the work's premiere in August.
Proms debutant Garry Walker, the RPO's Permanent Guest Conductor, completes the concert with Sibelius's surging 'swan hymn' symphony.
Prom 37, August 12
Philip Glass
Symphony No 7 ‘A Totlec Symphony’
UK Premiere
Violin Concerto
One of the most prolific, influential and instantly identifiable composers of our age, Philip Glass made an impact on the course of 20th-century music with his pioneering 'Minimalist' scores, going on to write major film scores – from Koyaanisqatsi and Kundun to The Truman Show and The Hours – and innumerable dance, theatre and operatic works.
In the first Prom ever devoted exclusively to Philip Glass's music, his first major orchestral score, the 1987 Violin Concerto, is played by Gidon Kremer, who made the premiere recording, and conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, a long-term champion of Glass's music.
Premiered in 2004, the 'Toltec Symphony' takes its title from the ancient pre-Columbian culture that reigned in Mesoamerica long before the coming of the Europeans, though vestiges of it still survive among the indigenous peoples of Mexico today.
Prom 67, September 5
John McCabe
Horn Concerto ‘Rainforest IV’
London Premiere
Marking John McCabe's 70th birthday, this Prom includes his Horn Concerto, which combines urban jazz with the sounds of the equatorial rainforests.
PCM 16, August 30
John McCabe
Sonata (Study No 12)
BBC commission: World Premiere
Prom 54, August 25
Michael Nyman
The Musicologist Scores
BBC commission: World Premiere
The Draughtsman’s Contract - selection
Six Celan Songs – Blume; Psalm
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Now best known for his soundtracks to such movies as The Piano, Gattaca and Wonderland, Michael Nyman started out as a musicologist, editing scores by Handel and Purcell; as a critic he coined the term 'Minimalism'; and, as a composer he first made his name by putting the music of classical masters through the Minimalist mill to generate raunchy, rhythmically propulsive, raucously energetic new works, such as his score for Peter Greenaway's 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract and the grief-frozen Memorial (which featured in Greenaway's later The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) – both of which are Purcell-based.
Now, to celebrate the year's two big Baroque anniversaries the Michael Nyman Band makes its Proms debut with a new work echoing Handel
Prom 72, September 8
Augusta Read Thomas
Violin Concerto No 3 ‘Juggler in Paradise’
BBC co-commisison with Radio France, Mr and Mrs Bill Brown and National Symphony Orchestra, Washington DC: UK Premiere
In Augusta Read Thomas's new Violin Concerto, the soloist takes the role of the 'juggler', rhapsodising a path through a pointillistic 'paradise' of bell sounds. And, to conclude, the BBC SO's Chief Conductor, Jiří Bělohlávek, takes the orchestra on a Beethovenian tour of the Austrian countryside.
More performances of Music Sales works:
Prom 8, July 22
Royal College of Music
Judith Weir
Ascending into Heaven
Prom 11, July 25
Peter Dickinson
Blue Rose Variations
Prom 29, August 6
Peter Maxwell Davies
Roma amor
Roma amor
Prom 30, August 7
Igor Stravinsky
Jeu de Cartes
Prom 31, August 8
Witold Lutoslawski
Concerto for Orchestra
Prom 32, August 9
Witold Lutoslawski
Variations on a Theme of Paganini
Prom 33, August 9
George Antheil
Ballet Mécanique
Igor Stravinsky
Les Noces (1917 version)
Prom 43, August 17
Manuel de Falla
El amor Brujo – three dances
Prom 76, Last Night of the Proms, September 12
Malcom Arnold
A Grand, Grand Overture
Albert Ketelbey
In A Monastery Garden
Hubert Parry
Jerusalem
Please click here for more News
