Ghosts: Warwick Blair Ensemble

Ghosts: a concert of contemporary music

(with a past and some electronics) by

Warwick Blair and Tim Ewers

Visconti Studio, Kingston University, Kingston Hill, KT2 7LB

7.30pm Friday 28 October 2016

Admission £10 on the door  (students free)

featuring Mimi Doulton (soprano)

Kate Ryder (piano)

Meredith White (piano)

Warwick Blair (electronic sounds)

Tim Ewers (electronics)

The Warwick Blair Ensemble returns to London performing recent piano and solo soprano works with electronics by Warwick Blair and Tim Ewers, part of Blair’s activity as Composer in Residence at Kingston University this Autumn.

The concept of memory, with the ability of the mind to retain certain information and yet reject other selective memories has fascinated the composer for many years.  In this concert he explores a musical palette that draws on various seemingly opposing genres or styles, creating a compelling and challenging soundscape.  Some have made the mistake of calling his work “cross-over” music, but it is much more than this.

Melusine demonstrates the influence of Puccini’s lyrical melodies and Wagner’s pioneering chromaticism, but also draws on serialism, the avant garde and contemporary songwriters such as Lorde & Rowland S Howard.  Etuden is a work that combines the influences of Chopin and Billie Holiday. 

Blair asserts that this collision of styles is his way of searching for a deeper meaning. Louis Andriessen (with whom Bair studied) talked about Blair creating a ‘universal metaphysical musical language’, just as Mahler desired his symphonies to represent the world.  And this is Blair’s purpose, to permit eclectic diversity and temporal associations to offer exceptional musical freedoms, where all sound is equally relevant and musical hierarchies are levelled, so that something more abstract, more universal, can emerge.

Tim Ewers is Associate Professor of Music at Kingston University and shares Blair’s interest in engaging with music from the past.  The concert features his recent piano work Ghost Sonata, in which the echoes of Beethoven’s late E major sonata (op 109) play a fascinating phantom role.  This work and Timaeus of Locri Contemplates the Creation of a Perfect World are the result of collaborations with the pianist Kate Ryder.  Ewers’ music is regularly played and has been performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Quorum, The Varèse Ensemble, Delta Saxophone Quartet, The Fibonacci Sequence, Gemini, Jane’s Minstrels, and the Wallace Collection.

For more information please contact Sean Rourke on 07802 442019, strmmmm@hotmail.co.uk.

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