London Sinfonietta's Writing the Future: new work by Luke Lewis, Alicia Jane Turner and Alex Paxton

London Sinfonietta's Writing the Future composers
Luke Lewis, Nwando Ebizie, Alicia Jane Lewis, Alex Paxton

The London Sinfonietta's Writing the Future programme supports young composers, allowing them to work with the ensemble over a two-year period to create new pieces of music that expands the chamber music format. Currently there are four composers on the project, Luke Lewis, Alicia Jane Turner, Nwando Ebizie and Alex Paxton [see my recent interview with Alex Paxton in advance of him winning one of this year's Ivors Composer Awards], working with the ensemble for the period 2019 to 2022 (extended because of the pandemic). And next year, we get a chance to hear what they've been doing.

On 6 February 2022, the London Sinfonietta's event Then & Now at the Southbank Centre's Purcell Room, gives us a chance to catch up with what two of the composers on the scheme, Luke Lewis and Alicia Jane Turner, have been up to. Sian Edwards will be conducting the premieres of Luke Lewis' Echoes Return Slow and Tell Me When You Get Home (with soprano Ella Taylor).

Lewis' new piece is based on musical transcriptions of speech patterns, made using innovative new software, which Lewis has then transformed into music. His piece is based on Welsh miners recorded in the 1950s by the visiting American ethno-musicologist, Alan Lomax and thus the new work becomes something of a dialogue with the past.

Turner's new work is a sensory piece exploring gendered experiences of walking alone at night, with a libretto that draws on advice given by police. It will be presented in an immersive staging directed by Lucy Bailey.

Full details from the Southbank Centre's website.

There is also a chance to catch up with Alex Paxton as his new work is being premiered by the London Sinfonietta as part of Tapestries at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 31 March 2021. Paxton will be the trombone soloist with percussionist Martin France in the premiere of Paxton's new work, and there will be the premiere of a new work by American experimental composer George Lewis.

Inspired by large Bruegel and Ody Saben paintings and Grayson Perry’s Walthamstow Tapestry, Paxton’s kaleidoscopic new piece is a busy and sensually colourful tapestry that depicts all aspects of our society. Written to include the sound from a series of improvisatory workshops with local schoolchildren, the piece is promised to be a riot of colour in sound.

Full details from the Southbank Centre's website.