Conductor and composer Jack Sheen leads us through a varied programme this afternoon. There’s elegance, balance and humour courtesy of Haydn’s Symphony No. 71, the beautiful simplicity of Hans Abrahamsen’s Wald, and we welcome two graduates of the BBC’s New Generation Artist scheme, violinist Elena Urioste and violist Timothy Ridout as soloists in Mozart’s ingenious Sinfonia Concertante.
Before all that though, we open with a piece which takes us inside a fascinating sound world of Jack Sheen’s own creation. A line, a curve, or figure was commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival and Britten Pears Young Artists Programme in 2016. Over to Jack to tell you more about this beguiling work:
“A lot of my music is about expansion and contraction, but A line, a curve, or figure , is almost entirely about just expansion: the piece is loosely based on the idea of a fractal, alongside the idea of stretching out something to see(/hear) more of it. So the initial three bars contain all of the material in the piece, and they simply reoccur, each time each section of the initial burst of sound is expanded to reveal more of itself and become less of a fleeting gesture and more of an established 'section of music'. And then there's a coda to shake things up somewhat.”
