"Lebab"

Live recording made at Great Court of the British Museum on 5th July 2013.
Performance by 121-piece orchestra, all RNCM Students and participating in the "Sound Histories", RNCM 40th Anniversary event.

All you need to know - I gave the flimsiest guidance and sketched out the overall architecture of the piece.
There were five hours of rehearsal/preparation in the days running up to the performance.
The performers gave generously from their hearts and every sound and idea you hear is individually chosen by them, in the moment.
There is no conductor.
Any cueing required is heard, not visual and governed by collective intuition.

Geeky stuff: The entrance lobby of the British Museum is adjacent to the Great Court and separated by simple archways. 
Sound from the Great Court doesn't travel well into the lobby, but unfortunately it travels too well in the reverse direction.
Accordingly I applied a very aggresive Izotope RXII filter at certain points to remove a lot of that unwanted 'hubbub'. 
Works very well for most of it, but in the Harps & Guitars section the filter adds an unintentionally extra-other-worldly quality to the music (you'll hear bits of the hubbub ghosting in behind some of the playing.)
Hope you enjoy it. I did, and more than I can adequately relay in mere words.
As I said to the orchestra prior to the performance itself - this was an opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you to you all.

Lebab

music: Gary Carpenter. words: Craig Taylor.
Rebecca-Jane Lea (1,3,5), Louise Ashcroft (1,2,3,5), Loré Lixenberg (4)
Ensemble 10/10 cond. Clark Rundell
The first Opera 63 is slightly past its sell-by date - events have moved on - but the rest resonate still....

One Million Tiny Operas introduced by Ivan Hewitt & Gary Carpenter

Six Songs for tenor and chamber ensemble.
music Gary Carpenter, words Eva Salzman
Jeffery Lloyd Roberts (tenor), Ensemble 10/10, Clark Rundell (conductor).
Recorded 'live' at first performance: October 8th 2008, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.
A Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 Commission.

3) Lunar Eclipse

I - 'Night resonance recedes' [00:00]
II - 'Miracle, bird or golden handiwork' [04:49]
III - 'That gong-tormented sea' [10:51]

The titles of the three linked tableaux that make up this piece come from the first, third and fifth stanzas respectively of W. B. Yeats' late poem Byzantium, which is rich in evocative and arcane imagery. While this provided the catalyst for the piece, the titles should not be taken as programmatic in a narrative or literal sense. Rather, in the symbolic spirit of Yeats, the music is a manifestation of the same concerns underlying the poem: a journey through a dark world of startling contrasts, visions of ecstasy and a deep yearning for permanence and transcendence.

The piece was commissioned by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and first performed by the orchestra conducted by Grant Llewellyn on 23/11/12 at BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff

Byzantium

THE unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

W. B. Yeats (1930)

Byzantium (2012)

Gary Carpenter studied composition at the Royal College of Music with John Lambert. He has lived in Holland and Germany and has written operas, musicals, ballets (mostly for Nederlands Dans Theater) and a radio music-drama - The One Alone with Iris Murdoch - as well as a substantial amount of concert music. Musical director and/or arranger-orchestrator on many stage shows and films (including The Wicker Man), he won the British Clavichord Society Composition Competition in 2004 (Van Assendelft’s Vermeer) and a 2006 British Composer Award with his harp trio Azaleas. A portrait CD - Die Flimmerkiste is available on NMC.
Recent works include The Listening Project Symphony (Radio 4, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra,– nominated for Prix Europa 2013), Fred and Ginger (LSO, Daniel Harding) Bassoon Concerto (Alan Pendlebury, RLPO, Vasily Petrenko, Piano Trio [Fournier Trio, Wigmore Hall, RPS Prize Nomination 2012)], SET – Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra [Iain Ballamy (tenor sax)/BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/HK Gruber, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester], The Food Of Love – a sequence of 12 Shakespeare songs in four books for choirs and piano commissioned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to celebrate the anniversaries of the Shakespeare’s birth (1564/2014) and death (1616/2016) and Dadaville for The First Night of the 2015 Proms. 
Gary is Professor of Composition at the RNCM, Manchester and a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music (HonRAM) in 2013.


One Million Tiny Operas introduced by Ivan Hewitt & Gary Carpenter

Gary Carpenter

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