Category Archives: Conducting

Pythagoras’ Toolkit Premieres

Just back from a brilliant week or so in Montreal conducting the premiere of my collaborative puppetry-music work made with Rachel Warr (Dotted Line Theatre). It was fantastic working with Rachel, the amazing musicians of Ensemble Paramirabo, and ridiculously talented puppeteers Gilbert Taylor and Edie Edmundson. The reception from both kids and adults was fantastic, and it was really great to be part of the Festival de Casteliers. Great to see lots of weird and wonderful puppetry in other shows too! Fingers crossed this production leads to further opportunities to do the piece. I’m hugely proud of what Rachel and I have created together and grateful to Jeff Stonehouse and all at Ensemble Paramirabo for believing in it and supporting the project.

Photos by Brenden Friesen

Pythagoras’ Toolkit production (finally) happening!

I’ve spent the past few months busily revising and reworking, with my creative collaborator Rachel Warr of Dotted Line Theatre, the score of Pythagoras’ Toolkit (La Boîte à outils de Pythagore in French!) for ensemble and puppeteer. We are working towards the inaugural production of the show with the amazing Ensemble Paramirabo, which will take place in early March in Montreal. I’ve just sent off the production score and parts!

Rachel is brilliant to work with. Super talented of course but also so focused on ensuring the narrative of the show is totally honed. We started working on the piece back in 2019 and have had lots of (mostly pandemic induced) setbacks along the way so it’s really great to be finally heading towards showing this piece to the world.

Details of shows on my gigs page. We are filming and recording it too.

Consequences Pics

Had a great time working with awesome University of Southampton students and colleagues on The Exquisite Corpse of AI (Consequences) back in February. Hope to have a recording/video soon but in the meantime here are some great photos from Ash from whatabouttheash.

The Exquisite Corpse Of AI (Consequences)

I’ve written a piece for 12-piece ensemble as part of a project at University of Southampton created and led by my amazing colleague Drew Crawford: The Exquisite Corpse of AI (Consequences). My contribution is called Phat Feet and features 12 awesome undergraduate musicians from the Department of Music. Drew has brought together a bunch of us including Bella Barlow and Brona Martin to create this exciting new piece that we’ll premiere at Turner Sims and then perform at a private conference for the commissioners Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence for Automated Investigations for Scientific Discovery Network.

Soldier’s Tale Photos

Directing Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale earlier this month was a big highlight of my conducting career. Awesome music of course, brilliant musicians (including a number of great friends it was a delight to work with again), great cast and an awesome creative team. Hope we can do more PACS soon! Here are a couple of snaps from rehearsals from the project…

In the Alps

I had blast directing the Hartley Loop Orchestra in a major University of Southampton Music Department project at Turner Sims, IN THE ALPS. We performed Richard Ayres’ masterpiece No 42. (In the Alps: an animated concert) featuring soprano Juliet Fraser (wearing an amazing garment made by students at Winchester School of Art), as well as Carnival of the Animals with soloists David Owen Norris and Verity Brooks and a brand new work, Shadows, by Zoe Sones. Was fantastic to work so closely with Southampton students and colleagues on the project and Juliet was AMAZING. Here are some pics by the massively talented Ash Sealy and a short audio excerpt.

eavesdropping.london · Juliet Fraser sings Richard Ayres ‘No. 42 — In the Alps’ (extract)