Here is a Hoedown, written in 2011 for the brass and percussion sections of ICO. ICO is an orchestra based in Warsaw, comprising of young musicians from seven eastern / ex-Soviet countries: Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. For those eastern players, I wrote the most Western-like tune I could think of, a Hoedown.
The first movement of this piece can be found bigged-up as the first movement of Factions. Mike Allen (Co-Principal trumpet in the RPO) and I spent a month in 1988 touring round Germany with an American Company doing West Side Story. It was brilliant fun at that age, and we couldn’t care less that some of the venues were pretty…
Loopy Louise is my wife Helen. On a train journey to Manchester, she suggested I write something for just mouthpieces, so that’s what this is. Or intended to be, anyway. It works much better on the whole instrument, and is an encore piece, containing 10 ways to say Goodbye, in about 90 seconds.
Quite the opposite of Speedbird, this is sleazy stuff. It sets off at a hell of a lick but soon collapses into a dark, smoky riff. The tenor sax takes a solo before being undertaken by the sultry baritone in its sultriest register. The piece builds with a huge crescendo, and ends as low and dirty as possible, on the…
Here are the Polish and British national anthems, closely entwined and used in some of Lutoslawski’s favourite techniques. This sounds intense, but is actually an attractive piece on the ear, and I enjoyed exploring it.
