Philip Grange: Homage

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I have not heard North Country composer John Casken’s (b. 1949) Piano Quartet. Philip Grange explains that he garnered material for his Tiers of Time (2007) from that work’s final bars. The stimulation of Grange’s ‘landscape inspired’ piano quartet was found in ‘the desolate, gloomy moorlands and the breath-taking vistas often illuminated by powerful sunlight’ prevalent in the English Peak District. The title itself is derived from geological strata apparent in those hills. This work is not a ‘cow and gate’ depiction of the countryside: it is hard-edged, more mill-stone grit that anything else. It is not a difficult musical language, but one that is not immediately approachable. I had to listen to it twice before the gentler, more lyrical passages revealed themselves, especially in the deeply moving conclusion. It is an impressive piece of writing for the ensemble. Whilst still in the North Country, I would love to hear Grange’s Lowry Dreamscape for brass band! United Kingdom I am over sixty years old: the end of the run of baby boomers! I was born in Glasgow, moving south to York in the late ‘seventies. My main interest is British Music from the nineteenth century onwards. I love the ‘arch-typical’ English countryside – and have always wanted to ‘Go West, Boy’. A. E. Housman and the ‘Georgian’ poets are a huge influence on my aesthetic. I have spent much of my life looking for the ‘Land of Lost Content’ and only occasionally glimpsed it…somewhere in…??? Philip Grange’s earliest published compositions date from the late 1970s, and include Cimmerian Nocturne, written for Peter Maxwell Davies’ Fires of London – and inspired by Grange’s studies with Max. His compositions have been performed around the world to great acclaim and many have been recorded. Contemporary music with real character in performances that rise to the challenges of an economical yet potent language.

During the early 1990s Grange completed two BBC commissions, Focus and Fade for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which performed the premiere at the Royal Festival Hall in 1992 conducted by Andrew Davis, and Lowry Dreamscape, which was premiered at the 1993 BBC Festival of Brass by the Sun Life Brass Band conducted by Roy Newsome. Other works from this period include Piano Polyptich (premiered by Stephen Pruslin on 26 June 1993 at the Aldeburgh Festival) [6] and Bacchus Bagatelles for wind quintet. [7] skill of the players that the results sound natural and obvious, never overly contrived. This is chamber musicGrange was born in London. He attended Peter Maxwell Davies’s classes at Dartington, and then took further, private, lessons with Davies while at The University of York, where he also studied composition with David Blake. [1] The event will include a presentation of the new opera Daedalus by the composer Professor Philip Grange and writer Fiona Sampson, MBE. Students from both the University’s Music Department and the RNCM, will perform an extract from the opera. A pupil of Maxwell Davies, Grange became a colleague of John Casken in Manchester. They both lived in the Peak District and have been profoundly affected by the landscape – ‘desolate gloomy moorlands and the breath-taking vistas often illuminated by powerful sunlight’, as Grange puts it. Tiers of Time, for piano quartet, was written to mark Casken’s retirement in 2007: it even quotes from his Piano Quartet. The general territory of both composers is a dialect of main¬stream modernism. If we compare Caskin’s Piano Quartet with Grange’s Tiers of Time, Grange has a more continuous line and is less frenetic. Shifting Thresholds for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, cello and conductor (2016) [30:52] proves a gloriously strange and moving piece. A ‘meditation’ on the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion,

Recorded live at Orkney's St Magnus Festival, Wells' account proves this 1974 theatre piece still has the There is a certain preoccupation with shadowy textures and sombre, puzzling subject matter, and this is matched in music of great subtlety and sometimes ambiguity, ominously ebbing and flowing in layers and levels of sound and meaning that slip away as fast as one tries to grasp them. Sombre and disturbing in the sense of thought-provoking, these haunting works will repay amply the attention they demand of the listener. Grange has written works for the National Youth Wind Ensemble of Great Britain, Ensemble Gemini and the Psappha New Music Ensemble. On 12 July 2009, the National Youth Wind Ensemble performed the world premiere of Cloud Atlas, a large-scale work based on the 2004 novel by David Mitchell, at the Cheltenham Music Festival, conducted by Philip Scott. [8] Ensemble Gemini's CD Homage, including the works Tiers of Time (piano, violin, viola and cello, 2007), Elegy (cello solo, 2009), Piano Trio: Homage to Chagall (1995), and Shifting Thresholds (flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, cello, 2016), was issued by Metier in 2019. [9] The Psappha Ensemble first performed Cimmerian Nocturne at the 1980 St Magnus Festival in Orkney. [10] increasingly threadbare wedding dress, later terrorized byyoung men in the neighbourhood, ageing, goingFiercely difficult to play though the music is – and it is meant to be unconducted, like true chamber music – it