Suite from "The Gadfly" Dmitri Shostakovich arr. Verhaert

As a student in St Petersburg, Dmitri Shostakovich earned money accompanying silent movies on the piano but was fired when he became too engaged with what was happening on screen – bursting out in hysterical laughter or forgetting to play for minutes on end. When the film industry started to experiment with prerecorded music, Shostakovich was no less fascinated. He wrote his first film score in 1928 and his last in 1970, just five years before his death. Among them were scores for documentaries, historical epics and pithy comedies.

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Shostakovich claimed that working on film scores kept his musical reflexes alert (the music needed to be precisely cued and cut according to scenes already shot) and allowed him to approach longer symphonic projects refreshed. In 1955, he was asked to write the score for a film based on Ethel Voynich’s best-selling 1897 novel The Gadfly, which tells the story of a 19th-century British revolutionary in Italy, a constant irritant (hence the title ‘gadfly’) to the authorities who was eventually shot by firing squad. The Soviet officials who commissioned the film believed it reflected the ideals of the party.

In 1956, the year after the film’s release, Shostakovich’s assistant Levon Atovmyan assembled a suite of 12 movements from Shostakovich’s full score... Atovmyan re-ordered some of the music, extending and augmenting it where necessary and replacing the original score’s church bells, organ and guitar with the more practical glockenspiel, xylophone, celeste and piano. From the opening Overture with its sense of heroic grandeur and anticipation of the battles ahead, to the shapely tune of the famous Romance, Shostakovich never addresses the art of film music with anything less than the utmost seriousness.

• Program Notes from Andrew Mellor

Never Alone - Ryan Hayes

Never Alone

Ignore your perfectionist false prophet.
Cut off the safety nets, unfurl the sails,
and throw yourself to the wind.
Stare into the eye of the universe and
let yourself feel beautiful
and free to be.

Breathe.  

Just breathe.

(Because we are worthwhile,
no?)

• Program Notes from Composer

Electro-Phantasm - Caleb Pickering

Commissioned by the Phonon Percussion Ensemble, Electro-Phantasm is a percussion sextet that fuses elements of the acid-jazz genre, post-rock genre, and video game/anime soundtracks. The combination of rhythmically active melodic and accompaniment lines mixed with harmonies utilizing mode mixture creates a sense of quirky and chaotic motion throughout.

• Program Notes from Composer