Ether Festival: This Week's Shows

Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre, occupying a 21-acre site that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is home to the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and The Hayward as well as The Saison Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. The Royal Festival Hall reopened in June 2007 following the major refurbishment of the Hall and redevelopment of the surrounding area and facilities.   Southbank Centre is home to Resident Orchestras, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

 

Oct 8 2012  7:45PM Purcell Room 
For John Cage by Morton Feldman
Darragh Morgan, violin; John Tilbury, piano
Celebrating John Cage's centennial year Darragh Morgan & John Tilbury perform Feldman's late great iconic work For John Cage. They first played this piece together at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2006 and since then have performed it throughout Europe and released on DVD Audio with Matchless Recordings to great acclaim. 

‘John Tilbury’s incredibly subtle, understated pianism seems ideal for these scores....Darragh Morgan’s technique in For John Cage (1982) enables the high harmonics to exhibit iron security in conjunction with other-worldly fantasy.’ TEMPO
£10

Oct 9 2012  7:30PM  QEH
Tyondai Braxton & London Sinfonietta: Central Market
London Sinfonietta; Leo Hussain, conductor; Caleb Burhans, conductor
I. Marshall: Fog tropes II for string quartet & tape 
E. Varèse: Octandre 
T. Takemitsu: Rain coming 
B. Dessner: Aheym 
T. Braxton: Central Market 
Tyondai Braxton performs Central Market with London Sinfonietta.
The former guitarist, keyboardist and singer of Battles, their debut album Mirrored was universally hailed as one of the records of the year in 2007, with Pitchfork declaring it 'a
breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.'
Central Market, released on Warp, saw Braxton return to solo work, recording the album with New York ensemble the Wordless Music Orchestra. As with Mirrored, it was heralded by the music press cementing Braxton's place as one of New York's most exciting artists.
The first half of the concert sees work by avant-garde US composer Ingram Marshall, one of Japan's greatest 20th century composers Toru Takemitsu, pioneer of electronic composition Edgard Varèse and The National's Bryce Dessner. 
Presented by Southbank Centre and London Sinfonietta.
£25 £20 £15

Oct 10 2012  7:45PM  Purcell Room
Anna Meredith + Horsebox
Anna Meredith is one of the UK's most in-demand young composers. Her music is widely performed around the world and alongside her acoustic commissions, Anna has also turned her focus to performing her eclectic electronic music with her band Horsebox. 
She has already supported These New Puritans, James Blake, Shlomo, Broadcast and Mira Calix, performing material from her debut EP 'Black Prince Fury', which will be released later in 2012.
£10

Oct 10 2012  8:00PM  QEH
iamamiwhoami
An extraordinary internet phenomenon, iamamiwhoami plays for the first time in the UK. 
Her album 'kin' has been released over the course of 2012, with different tracks appearing each fortnight on iamamiwhoami's YouTube channel. 
With 15 million views and counting, these surreal and visually stunning music videos have offered a glimpse of one of the most exciting new artists around.
£17.50 £15.00

 

Oct 11 2012  7:30PM QEH
Wolfe:  Adventures in Sound
BBC Concert Orchestra; Colin Currie, percussion; Keith Lockhart conductor
Cruel Sister / Tell Me Everything / LAD / riSE and fLY
Free your ears with a night of hyper-driven soundscapes and blow your mind!  Bang On A Can All-Stars founder Julia Wolfe’s music draws influence from the songs of Led Zeppelin to the symphonies of Beethoven while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them. She pushes performers and audiences to extremes and is today regarded as one of New York’s most acclaimed composers.  Cruel Sister. It’s noir. It’s haunting. The ‘harp goes mad’. Inspired by an old English ballad first heard on an album of the same name by British folk-rock group Pentangle, Wolfe depicts the story. And boy what a story it is: a tale of greed and jealously, sibling rivalry and murder. Steeped in post-Minimalist style, hypnotic patters and frenzied chords, Wolfe’s Cruel Sister is a nod to Steve Reich Different Trains, but on different tracks: crossed with Bernard Hermann in a Psycho twist.  Tell Me Everything. Everyone plays in their own time but plays together in a kind of off-beat samba — like several joyfully unwieldy village bands. In LAD, Wolfe creates a kaleidoscopic landscape for nine bagpipes. The drones and drawn-out glissandos build into a mind-numbing climax of such shocking proportions that it sounds like the cries of 1,000 birds. Not for the faint hearted.  And… the ultimate sound spectacle of the night is the world premiere of Wolfe’s riSE and fLY, based on the Jewish text from the Talmud and performed by the trailblazing percussionist Colin Currie.
£15 £12

Oct 13 2012  7:30PM QEH
Christian Marclay's Everyday 
Christian Marclay is one of the world's pre-eminent artists, winning the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennial for his work The Clock. In his 30-year career he has also collaborated with musicians including John Zorn, Kronos Quartet and Sonic Youth. At Ether he performs the London premiere of his new work, Everyday. Short film clips are re-edited and used as a video score as musicians Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Mark Sanders and Alan Tomlinson improvise music that develops alongside the footage.
'I have always enjoyed blurring the boundaries between music and art, sound and image, structure and chaos. The everyday embraces them all.'
Christian Marclay
'One of the ten most important artists of today' (Newsweek)
Praise for Christian Marclay's The Clock -
'A Masterpiece of our times. This staggering artistic montage telling the time in film and TV clips will run in your thoughts.' (The Guardian)
'Christian Marclay, the wizardly visual artist, composer and appropriator has done it again, and then some.' (New York Times)
£20 £15

Oct 13 2012  7:30PM RFH
John Cale
The founding member of one of the most defining bands of a generation, the Velvet Underground's John Cale returns to Royal Festival Hall two years after performing what is commonly regarded as his best solo record, Paris 1919. Having started his career with The Velvet Underground in the 1960s, Cale remains an unstoppable force on the contemporary scene. His latest EP released on Domino Records, Extra Playful, garnered much critical attention.
This show coincides with the release of his highly anticipated and latest studio album Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood which will contain brand new material for the first time since the blackAcetate LP in 2005.
£30 £25 £20

Oct 14 2012  7:30PM  QEH
Decasia with Aurora Orchestra
Aurora Orchestra; Nicholas Collon, conductor
M. Gordon: Decasia - a film by Bill Morrison (70')
Aurora gives the UK premiere of Decasia, widely regarded as one of the great cross-arts collaborations of the past decade. 
Constructed from severely decayed archival footage, Bill Morrison's hypnotic, stunningly beautiful film was cut to Michael Gordon's matching soundworld of decay, with a large amplified orchestra playing music that Alex Ross describes as 'wedding the hypnotic aura of minimalism to the detuned snarl of highbrow punk'.
£22 £15 £9

 


Links 

More Info 

http://ether.southbankcentre.co.uk 

 

Watch Julia Wolfe talk about the inspiration behind her 'riSe and fLY' percussion concerto which will be premiered at the Ether Festival on October 11 below:  

October 8, 2012 11:43am ET by Bang On PR   Comments (0)

, , , , , ,

SHARE THIS

Latest Press Releases