Starting 2025

Happy 2025! The year has started with some big composition projects which have been in the planning for a number of years and some that are new, fresh and extra exciting.

The end of 2024 saw me travel to the USA to work with Opera Philadelphia on my opera SITCOM.

It was a great chance to test out a chunk of the opera with an amazing company and musicans and to present the material at the National Opera Centre in New York City to other interested companies. This has led to another workshop in August 2025 where I will test out half of the opera with the full cast and have this performed to the public at Chautauqua Opera in the USA. If you’re over that way, mark August the 8th in your diaries.

It was not only opera I was working on in the USA last year, but also a new dance work with Pilobolus. We have been talking together for a couple of years now about making something together so it was great to finally get into the room with this lively, experimental and brilliantly original contemporary dance company to see where our points of creative connection might be. We took the first steps into a new work, with lots of synth and electronic sounds and I’m please to be developing this with Pilobolus further in 2025 towards a full new production.

Now on to 2025. I’m composing a work for the Deal Festival, where I am the artistic director. The piece is a 30min oratorio for a local wind band, The White Cliffs, two school choirs and our Bold As wind and brass students. It’s called Coastlines and will be an amazing way to bring the community together to perform a new work and to engage with the ideas of environment, immigration/migration that are so important to the communities that the Deal Festival serve. I can’t wait to keep working on the piece, to collaborate with these communities on the piece and for it to be performed as part of the Deal Festival on the 5th of July at Dover Town Hall, 1pm!

Coastlines composing will take me up until the end of February and then it is a quick change over to composing Sitcom for the rehearsals and workshop performance in August.

More soon from the composing desk. LUKE