Luke's Elegy and Ascent

Well I'm not the best placed to review Saturday evening's performance of Luke's new work, Elegy and Ascent, what with being a musical ignoramus and a very biased brother. I enjoyed it immensely, though, and his excellent talk beforehand (and our chats), and his reflections on how he reached this point in his artistic development, added a lot to the listening experience. It was fascinating to hear how he had, in the first half of the composition, taken part of a piano piece and redrawn it for orchestra. The original piece was composed using the chance (the drawing of cards) and Luke used a set of rules and his aesthetic sense to thread his way through this in a way that, as he pointed out, could only be his - another composer would have found another route through the chaos and made a different sort of beauty of it. To orchestrate this then, I suppose, added an extra layer of "human intervention" to the original randomness, as of course do the processes of conducting and performing the music. The second half of the Elegy and Ascent was very different but complementary: ordered but complex, and built around many interlocking, subtle and erudite ideas, as is usually the way with Luke's music. I won't say more for fear of sounding like I'm flattering my little brother, and we really can't have that. It would be even worse and kind of irrelevant to say we're proud of him, but...

I do hope that out there on't interweb somewhere somebody competent has done a proper job of reviewing the performance. One thing I have found, though, Karl Henning's blog where he previewed the concert and included Luke's notes. Also, if' you like to read scores, you can find lots of Luke's work on Scribd here (although not as yet Elegy and Ascent, I think). Hopefully in due course there will be a recording to listen to, too.

Something for the weekend

An(other) off-topic post intended for those small number of you who either (a) hang about in Leicester (hello!), or (b) are long-standing fans of the work of Luke Ottevanger (wow, how the hell did you find out about him?)
There's a concert this coming Saturday at the Fraser Noble Hall on London Road, Leicester, conducted by Michael Sackin and featuring Luke's Elegy and Ascent sandwiched between a Beethoven piano concerto and symphony. Luke is, let's say, not the greatest at publicising his work, and it's very rare that we in his family (or anyone else for that matter) get to hear what he has composed, so this is really exciting for us, and we have Michael to thank for asking Luke to write this piece, which I think he developed out of two previous works. Luke will be talking before the concert, hopefully explaining how the direction of his work has changed since its last public outing probably 10 years ago. Should be good, so come and hear the première!
Read more here.