After Babel

I come back to this blog after too long a break from it. The always manic end of the academic year was this time spiced up with the further addition of two commissions to be written over the summer, one with very short notice indeed. Hence, I was prevented from writing on these pages by the serious work I had to put in for those pieces and, on the other hand, also by the imperative need to get some proper rest during the summer.

Things had somewhat piled-up already before August: overdue reviews of Sir Harrison Birtwhistle’s double-bill at the Southbank and of Keija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin at the ENO that were never published. Nevertheless, and given the choice, I confess I preferred a blog-free summer getting on with all the composing I had to do and combining it with some serious cycling in the little time that the writing of my new string orchestra suite, Echo and Narcissus, left me.

At the same time, I also want to comment on certain aspects of the process of composing both the suite for strings (written in four weeks!) and Five Words, Three Phrases written for the Schubert Ensemble, and also how the collaboration with artist Albert Corbí and the filming of my Litanies for solo guitar went in Bilbao. Of course also publish some latter, more recent reviews like Tristan und Isolde at the ROH and Le Grand Macabre at ENO.

The beginnings of the academic year are never straight forward, and certainly not without extra work to do until everything sinks into a manageable, straight forward, if slightly chaotic, routine. All the promised articles for other series like Cartas desde Londres, or the Quadern Mediterràni will eventually get written and published over the next weeks.

This is a serious back to work for me, then!

Filed under: In English, Music by admin