Hot off the press - The Gardeners: Interludes and Arias

Will Vann conducting the world premiere of Robert Hugill and Joanna Wyld's opera The Gardeners
at Conway Hall, 18 June 2019 (Photo Robert Piwko)

As a composer I am an inveterate re-cycler and re-writer of things, so no sooner had Joanna Wyld and my opera The Gardeners been premiered than I started writing again, re-cycling some of the music into a new and more portable form.  Hence Interludes and Arias was born.

When The Gardeners, was premiered last year, some of the comments that I received were that the instrumental interludes were not long enough. These interludes were something of an experiment, designed to break up the dialogue and develop musical themes further, and I was rather pleased with the result. Rather than write more of them, I decided to extract the interludes and stitch them together as a purely instrumental piece. In fact, during the process, some vocal material found its way in as well, hence the title Interludes and Arias. There was some editing and re-arrangement, and quite a bit of transposing so that the music flowed satisfactorily.

I wanted to keep the basic line up from the opera, which used violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and harp but needed a couple more instruments so came up with the idea of using the same line up as the Ravel Introduction and Allegro, ie string quartet, clarinet, flute and harp.

The work is now looking for a home, so if it sounds of interest please do get in contact, I am happy to share the score of the work and my computer synthesization.