London Symphony Orchestra

1 Omie Wise
2 Young Emily
3 Dark Holler
4 Wave The Sea
5 Brushy Fork
6 Pretty Polly
7 Tears For Sister Polly

There is an infectious sense of joy and movement in Bryce Dessner’s Murder Ballades (2013) too, despite the work’s grisly backstory. This seven-movement instrumental cycle was inspired by the gruesome tales of real-life killings recounted in folk songs of the early 1900s.

For the most part, Dessner adopts the tuneful, Americana style of the original folk melodies, but along the way he enriches his sound palette with extended instrumental techniques and deft rhythmic details that give the work a foot-tapping buoyancy, with just an underlying hint of menace.

^{Note by Jo Kirkbride}

Bryce Dessner

Bryce Dessner has won Grammy Awards both as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger and co-principal song-writer. He is also an increasingly high-profile presence in the world of film score composition, with credits including Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning The Revenant.

A prolific writer with an open-minded musical paradigm, Dessner is in his natural element when collaborating across art forms. His colleagues include the world’s most creative and respected artists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Alejandro González Iñarritú, Katia and Marielle Labèque, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Caroline Shaw, Johnny Greenwood, Bon Iver, Justin Peck, Kelley O’Connor and Ragnar Kjartansson and Nico Muhly.

His rapidly expanding body of works are commissioned by the world’s leading ensembles, making him one of the most sought-after composers of his generation. Dessner has written orchestral, chamber, and vocal compositions for the likes of Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Metropolitan Museum of Art (for the New York Philharmonic), Kronos Quartet, BAM Next Wave Festival, London’s Barbican, Edinburgh International Festival, Carnegie Hall, Sydney Festival, eighth blackbird, Sō Percussion and New York City Ballet. His orchestrations can be heard on new albums by Paul Simon and Bon Iver, among others.

Bryce Dessner was named one of a collective of eight 'extraordinary artists, thinkers and doers' to help steer the artistic leadership of Esa-Pekka Salonen when he takes over as San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director from September 2020. In 2018 Steve Reich named Dessner 'an important composer with a developed technique and an intense emotional voice. He continues today as a major voice of his generation.'

Major classical works include Concerto for two pianos (2018) written for Katia and Marielle Labèque and premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and subsequently performed by co-commissioners Orchestre de Paris, Borusan Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonie and Orquesta Nacional de Espanã, with the US premiere taking place in September 2019; Voy a Dormir (2018) written for mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor and St Luke’s Orchestra and commissioned by Carnegie Hall; Skrik Trio (2017), commissioned by Steve Reich and Carnegie Hall and premiered by Pekka Kuusisto, Nadia Sirota and Nicolas Alstaedt; No Tomorrow (a ballet by Ragnar Kjartansson, Margrét Bjarnadóttir and Bryce Dessner; 2017 and winner of Iceland’s Griman Award); and Wires (2016), commissioned for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher.

The common theme in all this is rhythm, pure and simple. It is rhythm that drives us as human beings, and it is rhythm that is fundamental to music — pop, classical, or unclassified. In Karakurenai (2007), by steel pan virtuoso Andy Akiho, our attention is drawn to the ever-shifting rhythmic patterns, just as it was in Dessner’s Ballades. When we think we have settled into a groove, the goalposts move and we are forced to readjust our perceptions once again.

Akiho’s original version for steel pan sees the instrument specially prepared with cylindrical magnets, along with the instruction that the performer should use ‘the cardboard tube of a dry cleaner coat hanger’ for the ostinato in the right hand, and a wooden chopstick for the melody in the left. But if this seems meticulously prescriptive, Akiho also notes that the piece can be performed on any combination of instruments and can even include elements of improvisation if desired.

_{Note by Jo Kirkbride}

Andy Akiho

Described as 'trailblazing' (LA Times) and 'an imaginative composer' (NY Times), Andy Akiho is a composer and performer of new music. 

Recent engagements include commissioned premieres by the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, Guangzhou Symphony, Oregon Symphony with soloist Colin Currie, American Composers Orchestra, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Northwest, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, LA Dance Project, and experimental opera company The Industry.

Akiho has been recognized with many prestigious awards and organizations including the Rome Prize, Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Harvard University Fromm Commission, Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, and Chamber Music America. Additionally, his compositions have been featured on PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer and by organizations such as Bang on a Can, American Composers Forum, The Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong, and the Heidelberg Festival.

Akiho is also an active steel pannist and performs his compositions with various ensembles worldwide. He has performed his works with the Charlotte Symphony, South Carolina Philharmonic, Grand Rapids Symphony, Nu Decco Ensemble, LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Scharoun Ensemble, Miyamoto is Black Enough, the International Drum Festival in Taiwan, and has had four concerts featuring his compositions at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

In Anna Meredith’s Spook (2015), meanwhile, the impression of improvisation is written into the score. Above a persistent, pizzicato string base, a solo marimba and acoustic guitar riff against one another, their short, syncopated fragments at odds with the metronomic treadmill that pulses beneath. But now and then Meredith swerves to find a new groove, the marimba and guitar falling in step with the strings, and then out again. Each step change sounds like a new verse, a new beginning, the jangly pizzicato and strummed textures giving off more than a hint off the folksy, American bluegrass we heard earlier in Dessner’s Ballades.

_{Note by Jo Kirkbride}

Anna Meredith

Anna Meredith is a composer, producer and performer of both acoustic and electronic music. Her sound is frequently described as ‘uncategorisable’ and ‘genre-defying’, and straddles the worlds of contemporary classical, art-pop, electronica, ambient and experimental rock. Her music has featured everywhere, from the BBC Proms to flashmob body-percussion performances in the M6 services. Her work has been part of PRADA & Fendi fashion campaigns, numerous films, installations and documentaries; and has been performed at pop festivals, in clubs and classical concert halls worldwide. Her debut album Varmints was released in March 2016 on Moshi Moshi Records / PIAS to huge critical acclaim, with numerous four and five star reviews. Varmints was Loud & Quiet's Album of the Year 2016 and won the 2016 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award. Her 2019 album FIBS was nominated for the 2020 Hyundai Mercury Music Prize.

Anna is also a regular presenter on BBC Radio 3 and BBC 6 Music, as well as being a radio and TV guest, judge and panel member on numerous shows. She was Goldie's mentor for the TV show Classic Goldie. She has been Composer in Residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, RPS/PRS Composer in the House with Sinfonia ViVA, the classical music representative for the 2009 South Bank Show Breakthrough Award and winner of the 2010 Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers.

The humour and effervescence of Meredith’s score is a far cry from the sweeping melancholy of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight (2004). If you think you have never heard it before, think again. Track two of Richter’s second album, which was composed as a protest piece in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has been appropriated by more films and TV shows than almost any other. Its slow-moving, layered strings and desolate minor harmonies — which are later overlayed with first one, then two keening violins — lend it an emotional resonance that tugs at the heart strings. There are echoes of The Lark Ascending and of Schindler’s List here, but stripped back to a more barren landscape that exerts a powerful, hypnotic pull.

_{Note by Jo Kirkbride}

Max Richter

Max Richter stands as one of the most prodigious figures on the contemporary music scene, with ground-breaking work as a composer, pianist, producer, and collaborator. From synthesizers and computers to a full symphony orchestra, Richter’s innovative work encompasses solo albums, ballets, concert hall performances, film and television series, video art installations and theatre works.  He is classically trained, having studied at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, London, and completing his studies with composer Luciano Berio in Florence.

Memoryhouse, Richter’s 2002 debut, has been described by The Independent, and Pitchfork as a 'landmark', while his 2004 album The Blue Notebooks was chosen by The Guardian as one of the best Classical works of the century. SLEEP, his eight-and-a-half-hour concert work, has been broadcast and performed worldwide, including at the Sydney Opera House, Berlin’s Kraftwerk, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Philharmonie de Paris, and at the Barbican. In 2012 Richter Recomposed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, winning him the prestigious ECHO Classic Award, and an established place in the classical charts.

In recent years Richter’s music has become a mainstay for many of the world’s leading ballet companies, including The Mariinski Ballet, La Scala, The Joffrey Ballet, New York City Ballet, The Paris Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Semper Oper, and NDT, while his collaborations with Wayne McGregor for The Royal Ballet have been widely acclaimed.

Richter has written prolifically for film and television, with recent projects including Hostiles, Black Mirror, Taboo – which gained him an Emmy nomination, HBO series The Leftovers and My Brilliant Friend and most recently White Boy Rick, Mary Queen of Scots and the sci-fi drama Ad Astra starring Brad Pitt. His music is also featured in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir and in the Oscar-winning Arrival by Denis Villeneuve.

Richter’s most recent commissions are from the city of Bonn to mark the Beethoven 250th year anniversary, and a further collaboration between Richter, Margaret Atwood and Wayne McGregor, based on Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy of novels. His recorded project VOICES was released in 2020.