Live performance at St. George's Bloomsbury, Nov. 2022
Movement 1: 0.00 movement 2: 2.00

Derek Foster - Two Movements - Ardenti String Quartet

Live performance at St. George's Bloomsbury, Nov. 2022

Derek Foster - Spring Statement - Ardenti String Quartet

Live performance at St. George's Bloomsbury, Nov. 2022
Movement 1: 0'00", movement 2: 1'38", movement 3: 3'12", movement 4: 5'17"

Derek Foster - Miniature String Quartet - Ardenti String Quartet 1

First two movements of symphony, played as a piano arrangement by Anthony Green on 10 May 2014 at Schott's (publishers) recital room in Great Marlborough Street, London.


NICK RAY.  Symphony movts 1 and 2 (composer’s arrangement for piano) – dedicated to Prof Alexander Goehr.
The first movement, being fairly short, is a kind of prologue which also does duty for an exposition, presenting some of the material which is developed in later movements.  It begins with a declamatory chordal motif (a falling semitone) which quickly moves into an agitated contrapuntal section.  A new theme, played by trumpets and characterised by quivering staccato repeated notes, briefly establishes a D minor tonality but this is quickly effaced and the chordal theme of the opening returns leading to a climax.  After this, a long melody for solo violin develops one of the subsidiary ideas into a melancholy cantilena underneath which the other two main themes combine.  The music then sinks into despondency and darkness over a three-note ostinato in the lower strings returning to the D minor briefly established earlier.  The brief Allegro interruption does not manage to lighten the mood, which sinks further until the music falls into silence on a sustained vibraphone chord.  
The second movement (inspired by reading Vaclav Havel’s autobiography To the Castle and Back) is considerably longer and is a kind of scherzo.  A chaotic swirl of woodwinds leads down to a hammered two-note timpani motif, ushering in the grimly humorous ‘1st subject’ (tuba and contrabassoon) which is accompanied by a pulsating drone whose rhythm suggests alternating 5/16 and 7/16.  The movement has several contrasting ideas placed roughly together, and they gradually begin to combine and reveal links as the music proceeds.  After the climax, the drone rhythm returns and the woodwinds sadly pass broken fragments of the 1st subject around.  After a more optimistic-sounding section for brass in (or nearly in) C major, there is a coda which is in two sections: a slow dignified development of one of the themes, followed by a very fast section which forcibly restores the energetic and frantic character of the opening before collapsing suddenly into a kind of ‘throwaway’ ending in D major.   


Nick Ray Symphony movts 1 and 2 (piano arrangement)

Performed by Anthony Green, Schott Recital Room 29 April 2023

These six pieces of the final book in the set follow the same scheme as the previous books. 

No. 1 (Rip-Tide near Hurst Castle, Spring 2019) is a locality piece in which the uniform movement of the current is given a musical counterpart in the extended unison passages that form the greater part of the musical material.  No. 2 (A field-gate near Libbetswell, Newington, Kent, late July 1984) needs no explanatory note but its title.  No.3 (Bagatelle) is a short and capricious, preoccupied with a fluttering figure that is repeatedly interrupted by a  chordal motif.  No.4 (Ralph Vaughan Williams) pays this composer homage by interweaving two themes from his 5th Symphony.  No.5 has no title and is violent and impulsive, settling to an uneasy calm which does not completely resolve the tension created in the opening bars.

No. 6 attempts to provide a musical parallel to the chapter in Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, in which the narrator is terrified by grotesque statues – ‘a Stonehenge of rude and barbaric figures….with…superhumanly malevolent expressions on their faces’ - looming through the mist as he explores the unknown country.  The rising wind resonates in the hollow heads of the figures, producing unearthly moans which drive him to flee as if from pursuers.  The author later identified a chord-progression taken from one of Handel’s harpsichord suites, which he associated in his mind very much with this scene.  Some of this finds its way into the piece, although in a harmonic context very different from anything Handel  Handel would probably have expected.

Nick Ray Recollections Bk 6 final book

Wind trio using part of the Plainchant Victimae Paschali Laudes. Flute, clarinet, tenor horn. COMA Winds live at Hoxton Hall, March 2016

Derek Foster: Old Street

Sometime in late 2014 David Brain suggested I write a piano Sonata for him to perform.  He indicated that he favoured a single movement work around twenty minutes' duration, and that it should be - at least in part - a ‘programme’ piece.  He suggested Frankenstein as the inspiration.  I agreed to try and the Sonata, completed in August 2015, is the result.  
 
Some elements of sonata form are discernible in the work, namely the two contrasted subjects.  The development is incorporated within the one-movement structure but contains a scherzo whose material fuses with the other ideas, with sudden recitativo passages suggestive of dialogue.  The work is not programmatic for its entire length, but some of the events in the story may be suggested, particularly in the development section which builds to two violent climaxes, after which a long elegiac section brings the music back to its initial bleak sombre mood. 

David Brain gave the first performance of this work on May 21, 2016, at the John Savage Centre in Hainault.  His excellent performance was recorded but has never been made public, so until I can find an opportunity to record it myself, this musecore realisation will have to do (at least it gives some idea of it).

Nick Ray Recollections Bk 6 final book

nickray55

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