A new work by one of today's leading composers, Thomas Ades, and young Israeli video artist Tal Rosner, will be given its world premiere in the Royal Festival Hall on 28 April, at 7.30pm as the climax to the ETHER festival, Southbank Centre's annual festival of art and technology.
The work, In Seven Days (Piano Concerto with Moving Image), was commissioned by Southbank Centre and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and will be performed by Southbank Centre Resident Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and pianist Nicholas Hodges, conducted by Ades. This is Ades' first work with moving image. The programme is completed with Steve Reich's seminal Music for Eighteen Musicians.
Tal Rosner was given special access to the Royal Festival Hall during its 2-year refurbishment, and to the extraordinary Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, for the project. The resulting architectural video work is themed around the biblical creation story, the seven sections representing the days of creation. The visuals and the music tell the story in a set of abstract variations, each new element – light/darkness, sea/sky, heavenly bodies, plants, creatures – represented in a sequence of musical and visual generations.
The symbolism of the number seven, as six days and one culminating day of rest, informs both music and visuals, with the six separate video screens uniting to form one visual entity.
Gillian Moore, Head of Contemporary Culture at Southbank Centre, said: 'The music of Thomas Ades is dazzlingly rich and communicative. Its breathtaking sureness of touch, sometimes playful complexity, comes from a startlingly original 21st -century voice. With this work's use of contemporary technology and the combination of art forms, the ETHER festival provides the perfect home for this world premiere. I'm really looking forward to hearing and seeing how Ades and Rosner respond to the 1950s modernist architecture of the Royal Festival Hall and the curves of Frank Gehry's Disney Hall in Los Angeles.'
This work is one of a number commissioned from today's leading composers by Southbank Centre, for its Resident Orchestras and Associate Artists, to celebrate the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall last year. -- www.southbankcentre.co.uk
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