Blossomings

Wim Henderickx - © Miel Pieters

The composer Wim Henderickx has been commissioned to write a work as part of a tribute concert to the composer Jonathan Harvey. Henderickx's new piece Blossomings will be premiered by the BBC Singers and Marco Blaauw (trumpet) conducted by Martyn Brabbins at LSO St Lukes on 23 September 2016 at the concert Other Presences: The Music of Jonathan Harvey. Martyn Brabbins asked Henderickx to write the new piece partly because both he and Harvey shared a common fascination for the spiritual, Martyn Brabbins commented 'Jonathan perhaps more than most embraced the dialogue between the worlds of the spirit, religion and humanity. Similarly Wim Henderickx is fascinated by this conjunction, and creates music of great power and beauty.'

The concert's title comes from Harvey's work, Other Presences which was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival in 2005 by Markus Stockhausen when Harvey was composer in residence.

Henderickx and Harvey met several times, and Harvey was also the curator of the music festival Music@Venture in Antwerp in 2005 when Henderickx was commissioned to write a work (Nada Brahma) for soprano, instrumental ensemble and electronix. Blossomings is a triptych for unaccompanied choir and trumpet, based on texts from three different religions: Buddhism, Catholicism and Islam. The texts Henderickx uses are The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the Bardo Thodol), a text by Hildegard von Bingen and a text by Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic.

Full information from the Barbican website.