Professor Bad Trip comes to Wales

Professor Bad Trip sounds like the name of an entertaining cartoon character, it is in fact the title of a major tri-partite work by the contemporary Italian composer Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004), and Professor Bad Trip: Lesson III is the focus for the latest project from UPROAR, Wales' contemporary music ensemble.

For this new project, UPROAR, conductor Michael Rafferty, is presenting world premieres of three new pieces for large ensemble and electronics by contemporary Welsh composers - Sarah Lianne Lewis, Bethan Morgan-Williams, Andrew Lewis, alongside the Welsh premieres three contemporary classics by Tristan Murail, Kaija Saariaho and of course Fausto Romitelli. All performances will have a strong visual presentation, and there will be pre-performance talks by the composer and the conductor. Murail, Saariaho and Romitelli are all linked in that they wrote electroacoustic music inspired by or arising from the Spectral movement which developed at IRCAM in Paris

Fausto Romitelli uses the following paragraph from Henri Michaux’s Light Through Darkness (Connaissance par les gouffres) as an epigraph to the score of Professor Bad Trip:

"A vast redistribution of sensitivity takes place, making everything bizarre, a continual complex redistribution of sensation. You sense less here, and more there. Here and there where? In dozens of ‘heres’ and dozens of ‘wheres’ that you didn’t know, that you didn’t recognise” 

(Henri Michaux, 'Connaissance par les gouffres / Light Through Darkness')."

UPROAR was launched in 2018, under the direction of Michael Rafferty, co-founder of Music Theatre Wales. The ensemble's inaugural performances, 10x10 in October 2018 was a sell-out.



UPROAR's Professor Bad Trip programme debuts on 28 February 2020 at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, and then tours to Aberystwyth (13/3/2020), Caernarfon (21/3/2020) and at the Festival KLANG, Montpellier, France (3/6/2020). Full details from the UPROAR website.