Tag Archives: Composers

Crossroads Festival

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Date: Thu 5th November, 2020
Venue: Universität Mozarteum, Salzburg, Austria

The Riot Ensemble journey out to Austria to open the Crossroads New Music Festival.

International contemporary music festival Crossroads aims to promote the collaboration between composition students and young contemporary music performers from different countries. The festival gives an opportunity to the young artists to collaborate together by sharing their cultural and personal experiences. This annual event is organised by Lithuanian student Silvija Čiuladytė and the Institute for New Music, Mozarteum University Salzburg.

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Open Circuit

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Date: Sat 14th Mar, 2020
Venue: Leggate Theatre, University of Liverpool L69 3DR

Centered around Brian Ferneyhough’s feverishly virtuosic sextet Liber Scintillarum (Book of Sparks) and Grisey’s spectral masterpiece Talea, this programme explores the extremes of contemporary ensemble writing.

Siemens Prize winning composer Clara Iannotta’s mesmerising string duo in which, “like skaters in a concrete bowl, the bows of violin and viola glide across their strings, creating hushed, airy harmonics”, sits alongside a new work by Israeli composer Hadas Pe’ery and Ben Hackbarth’s thrilling Lockstep Variations which features two speakers placed inside the percussionists snare drums creating “a pair of phantom musicians, two disembodied drummers who are spatially and gesturally enmeshed with the acoustic ensemble.”

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Oi Kuu: Southampton

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Date: Mon 21st Oct, 2019
Time: 1.00pm
Venue: Turner Sims, Highfield Campus, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ
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Revolving around the Bass Clarinet and its massive expressive and dynamic range, this chamber concert features four members of Riot Ensemble’s Artistic Board in music that is every bit as wild as it is intimate. 

The bombastic duo’s for Bass Clarinet and Saxophone from American composers Lee Hyla and Marc Mellits are paired with European musing Oi Kuu (for a moon) from Kaija Saariaho and Thierry Pécou’s amorphous Manoa. 

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Oi Kuu: Manchester

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Date: Thur 24th Oct, 2019
Time: 1.10pm
Venue: Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, University of Manchester, M13 9PL
Cost: Free | Find out more here

Revolving around the Bass Clarinet and its massive expressive and dynamic range, this chamber concert features four members of Riot Ensemble’s Artistic Board in music that is every bit as wild as it is intimate. 

The bombastic duo’s for Bass Clarinet and Saxophone from American composers Lee Hyla and Marc Mellits are paired with European musing Oi Kuu (for a moon) from Kaija Saariaho and Thierry Pécou’s amorphous Manoa. 

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HCMF: Evan Johnson

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Date: Sat 16th November, 2019
Time: 7.00pm
Venue: St Paul’s Hall, University of Huddersfield, HD1 3DH
Cost: Tickets £15 – £18 available online

Evan Johnson‘s Linke Hand eines Apostels (Left hand of an apostle) is a reflection on a sketch by Albrecht Dürer, a drawing which attends feverishly to details of vein, bone, skin, draped folds of cloth, and an almost painful-looking torsion of joints and knuckles–details largely lost in the oil painting that resulted.

This is paired with a composition by Swedish composer, Lisa Streich whose piece ZUCKER (SHOCKER) for motorised ensemble and Israeli-Swiss composer Omri Abram‘s search for an equilibrium in his wind quintet, Zohar (Iridescence).

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HCMF: Ann Cleare Portrait

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Date: Fri 15th November, 2019
Time: 9.30pm
Venue: Huddersfield Town Hall, Corporation St, Huddersfield, HD1 2TA
Cost: Tickets £15 – £18 available online

In the first of two concerts at hcmf// 2019, The Riot Ensemble paints a portrait of Ann Cleare, one of Ireland’s leading modern composers. The first Irish composer to win the Ernst von Siemens award, Cleare’s work is a dialogue: her music talks to its environment, as well as its listener, constantly being shaped by the course of nature itself. For this concert, the malleable setting of Huddersfield Town Hall will transform into an open-plan forum; audience members will be immersed in the space, discovering how it carries Cleare’s music. Consummate shape-shifters, The Riot Ensemble are the perfect group to play – and place – Ann Cleare’s music.

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Screaming Shapes

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Date: Tues 22nd October, 2019
Time: 7pm
Venue: University Hall, Shakespeare Street, Nottingham, NG1 4FQ
Cost: Tickets £5-£15 available online from nonsuch studios

Groundbreaking brings the very best contemporary music from the world’s top composers to Nottingham. This programme features the ever-present “Pierrot plus percussion” lineup in music that has been commissioned and featured by Riot Ensemble on our Speak, Be Silent, release.

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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic: Close Up Concert

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Date: Mon 25th Nov, 2019
Time: 8pm
Venue: Music Room, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (L1 9BP)

Riot Ensemble feature in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s Close Up Concerts series, giving you the chance to experience works by Rebecca Saunders, Lee Hyla, Bernhard Gander, Marc Mellits, and Isabel Mundry in an intimate and relaxed setting in the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room.

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November Music: Saunders & Osborn

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Date: Sun 3rd Nov, 2019
Venue: ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

From their new album Speak, Be Silent, Riot Ensemble perform Rebecca Saunders’ Stirrings Still III which continues her longstanding fascination with the writings of Samuel Beckett, sharing its title with Beckett’s final work of prose. Through its fragile and haunting soundworld, the piece’s brittle textures and distant keening explore minute musical activities on the edge of extinction.

Alongside this Laurence Osborn’s Ctrl which was premiered by Riot Ensemble at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2017. Ctrl is a three movement song-cycle about masculinity written from the fragmented perspective of a male character and sung by a female singer.  

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