Premier of new piece ‘Mary Ann Sate’This Friday I’m looking forward to going to Birmingham to hear the premier of my new piece for flute and piano, written for BBC New Generation Artist, Elizaveta Ivanova. Elizaveta is an extraordinary musician, a prize winning soloist and also is a co-soloist in the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. When we met, she told me she had been drawn to my music by my songs and that she wanted me to write something close to vocal music for her. My approach was to conceive a kind of miniature opera for Elizaveta and at the time I had been very taken by Alice Jolly’s “Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile”, a unique fictional found memoir set in Stroud at the close of the 19th century and told by an elderly maidservant. I took strong themes from the story (spirituality, unrequited love, sibling rivalry and truth) and set poems which resonated with those themes (by Yeats, Tsvataeva and Housman) as a starting point. The movements then took their own momentum (always a good sign) and Elizaveta and I met in the middle of the writing period to workshop. I had no idea the flute could sound so beautiful and I was happy to discover a deep thinking musician who had a real impact on the course of the piece. I can’t wait to hear Elizaveta premier it along with pianist Sanja Bizjak at the end of this week. At some point soon BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting that performance - I will be sure to keep you posted…
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