Low Trio and festival round up

Since I last checked in I have had a new opera premiere at two of the UK’s leading festivals. Cheltenham and Presteigne. The performances were fantastic, with a brilliant cast and band put together by Nova Music under the baton of George Vass. The music pushed the singers to vocal places of hissing, humming, glissing and singing. My music focused particularly on the Soprano and Baritone, with the central scene acting as an extended aria for the Soprano, who in this production was the stunning Donna Lennard.

The opera itself, Awakening Shadow is a mixture of original scenes by me and Benjamin Britten’s 5 Canticles, brought together to form one unified opera.

(c) Spencer McPherson

Themes of light and darkness emerge in the music and these often align themselves with a shifting view of Faith and Humanity. Voices sing in duos, trios and quartets to show a untied identity, and this is set in contrast with expressive passages of solo vocal writing that allow us to see individual expression of the universal themes that purvey Awakening Shadow.

Britten’s Canticles were not composed for the stage, but they deal with dramatic subject matter that is highly operatic, including religion, sacrifice, birth, love, death and humanity itself. Complimentary text to the Canticles have been used in my scenes to give further dramatic form to the opera and extend the themes of the Canticles into something new. My scenes show a search for language, from wordless ensemble singing at the start of the opera, to clear text based choral writing in the opera’s final scene, Mutability. Fragments of text from the Old and New Testaments, appear in my scenes as commentary either side of Britten’s Canticle II, Abraham and Issac, Different perspectives on a “new star” are explored in the Styles scene Nova Stella and Britten’s Journey of the Magi. Sections of Byron’s poem Darkness allows Styles to explore a post-apocalyptic wasteland and Shelly’s Mutability suggests the opera’s final pathway towards a humanist and existential outlook on the world. (Score/parts available soon).

“I’ve been blown away by Luke Styles’ premiere of Awakening Shadow.” Camilla King (director of the Cheltenham Music Festival) in Classical Music

I am really pleased with the very different drama of this opera than in my narrative driven works. It is very open to a production team to twist and turn it in different directions and I have made use of the voice in a much more abstract and instrumental way than when I am composing with a narrative text. I suspect I will work this way of composing for the voice into some of the new vocal works I have lined up for 2022 and 2023.

Five Phase Sphere - a low trio

In a couple of weeks I will head up to Aberdeen, Scotland for the premiere of a low trio I have written. In 2005 I heard a low trio for viola, cello and double bass by the composer Wolfgang Rihm (whom I subsequently studied with from 2006-2008) and I was awestruck by the sound world and driven to write my own low trio. Since then 16 years has passed, but the desire to write this work and the feeling for low, string, chamber music has never faded.

The resulting work, Five Phase Sphere presents 5 phases of music for this specific combination of instruments. The resonance of these 3 instruments together, their low frequencies and their combined musical potentials are all stimuli for each phase. Across each phase are musical links, but together, as five points of music they form a sphere of material, in my imagination.

I’m thrilled that new music champions have come together to commission this work, which will premiere in the UK at Sound Festival and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival by the extraordinary Red Note Ensemble in 2021, followed by an Australian premiere by Ask Duets in 2022. This will really be the realisation of one of my longest held compositional ambitions.

The low theme continues over the next few months. I will be giving a composition master class on composing for the double bass at Sound, as part of the Composers Day. I will then start composing new works for double bass and piano, as part 60min concept cycle called FIRE. This work has been very generously supported by the PRS Foundation and the Marchus Trust. More information about this project, including performances, recordings and partners will follow shortly.