Anthony McGill and Britten Sinfonia
Trailblazing clarinettist Anthony McGill embarks on his residency at Milton Court with an evening of conversation and performance; at its heart is the European premiere of Anthony Davis’s powerful You Have the Right to Remain Silent.
Milton Court Artist-in-Residence Anthony McGill and Britten Sinfonia’s programme includes the European premiere of Anthony Davis’s concerto You Have the Right to Remain Silent and three pieces for string orchestra – by Jessie Montgomery, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and George Walker.
You Have the Right to Remain Silent was written by American composer, pianist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Davis (born 1951). It was commissioned for Miller Theatre at Columbia University in New York City and was premiered in 2007 with J D Parran as solo clarinet and the Perspectives Ensemble. The piece was inspired by Davis’s experience with law enforcement in the 1970s in which a police officer wrongfully pulled him over.
He recalled:
He had put his siren on when he stopped me, and I was going to say, what the hell is going on? I’m going to be late for my concert. [My wife] said, ‘Don’t get out of the car, because he has a gun.’ He had his gun pointed at me.
It was later discovered that this was a case of mistaken identity. The concerto is written for solo B flat clarinet and contra-alto E flat clarinet and small orchestra. Throughout the work, Davis interweaves strong musical idioms featuring the solo clarinet as the protagonist with the ‘Miranda warning’ (i.e. the notification customarily given by police to criminal suspects in custody advising them of their right to be silent) in rhythmic spoken word.
In the first movement, ‘Integration’, an intense dialogue takes place between solo clarinet and the orchestra. The second movement, called ‘Loss’, uses the contra-alto E flat clarinet and takes the listener on a journey of what it is like to lose someone. Next is ‘Incarceration’, which has a jagged edginess. The last movement, ‘Dance of the Other’, transports the listener to what it feels like to walk – or dance – in another person’s shoes and how people from different communities can come together.
The pieces by Jessie Montgomery, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and George Walker are all written or arranged for string orchestra. Montgomery was born in 1981 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. She is the composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Organization, which supports young Black and Latinx musicians.
Starburst (2012) was commissioned for the Sphinx Organization’s flagship chamber ensemble the Sphinx Virtuosi. It has energetic motifs and depicts the creation of new stars in a galaxy, while also seeking to represent musically the members of the dynamic ensemble for which the piece was written.
The second piece for string orchestra is by Black-British composer, conductor and political activist Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), who was born in Holborn to an English mother and a Sierra Leonean father. His grandfather taught him to play the violin. He excelled very quickly and, aged just 15, began studying at the Royal College of Music. While there he studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and his contemporaries were Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Coleridge-Taylor’s music, however, retained the influence of his African heritage.
Four Novelletten was written between 1901 and 1903 and may have been inspired by Robert Schumann’s four piano miniatures Novelletten, Op 21. Coleridge-Taylor’s four-movement piece exploits the lush, Romantic soundscape of a modern string orchestra. It was dedicated to violin virtuoso and composer Miss Ethel Barns, who performed and premiered much of Coleridge-Taylor’s music. The third Novelletten (Andante con moto), features a solo violin, showcasing the virtuosity of the instrument in its higher register – perhaps revealing the composer’s affection for the instrument. The fourth (Allegro molto) is an energetic and grand movement, ending exuberantly.
Lyric for Strings was written by composer, pianist and organist George Walker (1922–2018) who was born in Washington DC. Walker was exposed to music at an early age and studied the piano at Oberlin Conservatory and the Curtis Institute of Music, later receiving a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. He then taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey until his retirement in 1992. Walker was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music – for his work Lilacs (1996).
Lyric for Strings was originally called Lament and formed the second movement of his First String Quartet (1946), which he wrote while a student at Curtis. It was premiered the same year by the student orchestra. In 1990 Walker reworked the piece for string orchestra and gave it its current name. This new arrangement is one of his most performed works and is dedicated to Walker’s grandmother Melvina King, who was a slave and died shortly before its completion.
© Aaliyah Booker
Details
Programme and performers
Jessie Montgomery Starburst (chamber orchestra version)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Nos 3 and 4 from Four Novelletten
3. Andante con moto
4. Allegro molto
Panel discussion with Anthony McGill, Leroy Logan and Anthony Davis
Anthony Davis You Have the Right to Remain Silent (European premiere)
1. Interrogation
2. Loss
3. Incarceration
4. Dance of the Other
George Walker Lyric for Strings
Britten Sinfonia
Pablo Urbina conductor
Anthony McGill clarinet
Anthony Davis speaker
Leroy Logan speaker
Earl Howard synthesizer
Artist biographies
Britten Sinfonia is a different kind of orchestra. It is defined not by the traditional figurehead of a principal conductor, but by the dynamic and democratic meeting of its individual players and the broad range of the ensemble’s collaborators – from Steve Reich, Thomas Adès and Alison Balsom to Pagrav Dance Company, Father John Misty and Anoushka Shankar.
Rooted in the East of England, where it is the only professional orchestra working throughout the region, Britten Sinfonia also has a national and international reputation as one of today’s finest ensembles. It is renowned for its adventurous programming and high-quality performances, and equally for its record of commissioning new music, nurturing new composing talent and inspiring schoolchildren, hospital patients and communities across the East of England.
Britten Sinfonia is an Associate Ensemble at the Barbican, Resident Orchestra at Saffron Hall and has residencies in Norwich and Cambridge. It has an annual chamber music series at Wigmore Hall and appears at UK festivals, including Aldeburgh, Brighton, Norfolk & Norwich and the BBC Proms. It is a BBC Radio 3 Broadcast Partner and has award-winning recordings on several record labels.
Highlights this season include Handel’s Messiah in Mozart’s re-orchestration and tours and performances with soprano Elizabeth Watts, tenor Allan Clayton, saxophonist Jess Gillam, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, cellist Abel Selaocoe and New York City Ballet.
Spanish conductor Pablo Urbina was born in 1988 and fundamental to his beliefs is that classical music can be used as a vehicle for social change. He won third prize at this year’s Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition; since 2019 he has been Principal Conductor of London Orchestra Vitae. He is also an Ambassador of the Amber Trust UK, which provides classical music to children with visual impairments.
He has conducted leading orchestras, including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Spanish National Radio Orchestra, the Hallé, Ulster Orchestra, City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong and Castilla y León Symphony Orchestra.
Outreach and education form a major strand of his activities and he has worked in outreach projects with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the BBC Proms, as well as giving masterclasses at Durham University and Baylor University in the USA. The promotion of new music and the revival of neglected repertoire is also important to him.
Pablo Urbina started studying French horn at the age of 8, before further studies at the Thornton School of Music in the USA and the Royal College of Music.
Clarinettist Anthony McGill enjoys a dynamic international solo and chamber music career and is Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic – the first African-American principal player in the organisation’s history. He is the recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Prize, one of classical music’s most prestigious awards.
He appears as a soloist with top orchestras, including the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras, the Metropolitan Opera and the Baltimore, Boston, Chicago and Detroit Symphony orchestras. He performed alongside Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and Gabriela Montero at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece by John Williams.
As a chamber musician he has collaborated with the Brentano, Daedalus, Guarneri, JACK, Miró, Pacifica, Shanghai, Takács and Tokyo quartets, and performs with leading artists, including Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Gloria Chien, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, Midori, Mitsuko Uchida and Lang Lang.
He serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School and is the Artistic Director for its Music Advancement Program. He holds the William R and Hyunah Yu Brody Distinguished Chair at the Curtis Institute of Music.
In 2020 Anthony McGill’s #TakeTwoKnees campaign, protesting at the death of George Floyd and historic racial injustice, went viral. Earlier this year he partnered with Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative to organise a classical music industry convening at EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, in which leaders and artists in classical music examined America’s history of racial inequality and how this legacy continues to impact their work.
anthonymcgill.com
Earl Howard is a composer, performer and improviser on saxophones and electronics; for over 40 years he has presented his compositions in the United States and Europe at numerous venues, including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and Zankel Hall, The Kitchen, Donaueschingen Festival, Ars Electronica, Merkin Hall and the Whitney Museum. His method of creating orchestrated sounds with electronics and processing live improvisation creates unique, densely layered textures.
In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to compose Superstring for a large ensemble, featuring performers including Wu Wei, Miya Masaoka, Ernst Reijseger, Mark Dresser, Al Jaffe and Harris Eisenstadt, who premiered it at Roulette. He has also received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and, in 1998, Harvard’s Fromm Foundation Commission. This year the International Contemporary Ensemble has received a NYSCA commission for Earl Howard to compose a new work.
He has also produced soundtracks for film and video artists, including Nam June Paik, Mary Lucier, Rii Kanzaki, Bob Harris and Bill Brand. His compositions have been recorded by a number of musicians, including Anthony Davis’s recording of Particle W for piano and tape, released on Gramavision and Gerry Hemingway’s recording of D R for Solo Percussion on Auricle Records. His works can also be found on Erstwhile Records, Mutable Music, New World and Random Acoustics.
Earl Howard has collaborated with Anthony Davis since 1981 and has been the guest improviser and synthesist in Wakanda’s Dream, The Central Park Five and You Have the Right to Remain Silent (with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 2020, the New York Philharmonic in 2021 and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2023).
Anthony Davis was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1951; he was Yale University’s first Lustman Fellow, teaching composition and Afro-American studies, returning to the institution as Visiting Professor of Music in 1990. In 1992 he went on to become Professor of Music in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and subsequently became a full-time professor at the University of California at San Diego in 1998.
He made his Broadway debut in April 1993, composing the music for Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, following it up later the same year with the second part of Kushner’s play Perestroika on Broadway.
His opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X was the first of a new American genre: opera on a contemporary political subject; it is currently being performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It played to sold-out houses during its premiere run in 1986 and received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 1993 following its release on the Gramavision label the previous year.
Anthony Davis’s second opera, Under the Double Moon (1989), was premiered at the Opera Theatre of St Louis; it’s a science fiction opera with an original libretto by Deborah Atherton. His third opera, Tania, based on the abduction of Patricia Hearst, was premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in 1992 and later released on Koch in 2001. A fourth opera was unveiled at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997: titled Amistad and set to a libretto by poet Thulani Davis (the librettist of X) it explores the trial of slaves during a shipboard uprising.
Leroy Logan MBE is one of the UK’s most highly decorated and well-known Black police officers.
A respected and highly regarded commentator on policing and wider social justice issues, he believes that there is still much work to do in creating a more equitable and fair criminal justice system.
Leroy Logan’s early career was recently depicted in Red, White and Blue, the BAFTA- and Golden Globe-winning episode of director Sir Steve McQueen’s acclaimed television series, Small Axe.
After his retirement he published his autobiography, Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop, and continues to draw on his decades of policing experience to give perceptive, critical analysis of the current UK justice system. He has appeared on Channel 4, Newsnight, Sky, BBC Radio 4, HARDTalk and in the Guardian, among many others.
As the founding member and past Chair of both the Met and National Black Police Association (BPA), he also co-founded Voyage Youth, a citizen’s focus of the BPA. A social justice charity, it aims to empower marginalised, young, Black people and provide them with the self-awareness and motivation to transform themselves and their communities.
In 2022 Leroy Logan was appointed Chair of Transition to Adulthood (T2A), the justice arm of the Barrow Cadbury Trust.
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