Happy birthday to Liza Lim – the day after an extraordinary world premiere at Lucerne Festival by the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra of her Roche Commissions composition Tongue of the Land. It’s a thrillingly original and powerful new work that brings a reconstructed 2,000-year-old Celtic bronze trumpet – aka the carnyx – into a modern orchestra. Lim wrote it for the trailblazing Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw as soloist.
Tonight – Sunday 30 August at 10pm–Midnight PDT (UTC−7) – Seattle-based composer, writer, and broadcaster Michael Schell will broadcast a new interview with Liza on Flotation Device on 91.3 KBCS, a long-running program devoted to contemporary, experimental, and improvised music. It will be available afterwards in podcast format at https://www.mixcloud.com/flotationdevice/
SRF 2 Kultur Swiss Radio has made last night’s complete Lucerne Festival concert available to listen to on demand here. The program also features Jörg Widmann as soloist in Mark Andre’s über for clarinet, orchestra, and live electronics, as well as John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony. Peter Rundel’s conducting was superb – precise but passionate while navigating three entirely different sound worlds. Tongue of the Land comes at the beginning of the second half, starting just after 1:11:00. (A VPN is required to listen from outside Switzerland.)
I also had the privilege of editing the accompanying book published by Roche, which commissioned Tongue of the Land through the biennial Roche Commissions series. Brilliantly designed by award-winning designer Alexey Murashko, it traces Liza’s creative process and the remarkable journey of the carnyx into this new work. I’ll share a link as soon as it becomes available:
Filed under: Liza Lim, Lucerne Festival, Lucerne Festival Academy, new music, Roche Commissions
MEMETERIA 