London Symphony Orchestra

Nasubi was the star of the Japanese reality TV show Susunu! Denpa Shonen. Beginning in 1998, Nasubi was forced by the producers of the show to remain in isolation for 15 months in a small apartment with no food, clothes, or contact with the outside world. In order to survive, he was made to enter tens of thousands of magazine sweepstakes to win various prizes, which took up the vast majority of the time he spent alone. Due to the unpredictable nature of these sweepstakes, he would often find himself in desperate situations, eating uncooked rice and dog food. Nasubi would be taunted by the producers, who would move him to different locations in the middle of the night, and would frequently change the rules of the game; he was made to spend several more months in isolation after he believed his ordeal was over. After being freed, Nasubi found it difficult to be in social situations, having become so acclimatised to his unusual and solitary life.

This piece was originally written in April 2020 for cellist Robert Irvine for the Red Note Ensemble's online season, and has since been adapted into a version for violin recorded by Martin Suckling and a version for viola that will be premiered by Canadian composer and violist Emily Hiemstra.

Robin Haigh

Robin Haigh writes music that channels the frivolity and opaque nostalgia of millennial life into a kind of hazy 21st-century romanticism. His ‘completely refreshing’, ‘magical’ recorder quintet In Feyre Foreste earned him a British Composer Award in 2017 aged just 24, and his ‘quirky, playful, bold and original’ Britten Sinfonia commission Grin won an Ivor Novello Award in 2020. He is a Britten Pears Young Artist 2021–22, with upcoming commissions for the Marsyas Trio and Aldeburgh Festival.

Robin’s individual approach to music is informed by his early experiences writing for the progressive metal band he played in as a teenager growing up in Newham, East London. His pieces are often based on unusual concepts: Samoyeds (for the Ligeti Quartet) makes music out of the sounds of howling dogs; Aesop (an LSO commission) asks orchestral performers to play on recorders; and No One (commissioned by Presteigne Festival) reimagines the harp via Homeric memes.

Curved Form (No. 23) is a single, shimmering mass of interwoven lines. The four instruments seamlessly weave in and out of one another, creating subtly shifting waves of sound that ripple upwards across the instruments. Imagine a time-lapse view of the night sky – the stars’ motion suddenly visible to us as they pass over our heads. Imagine a rolling ocean wave whose motion began long before we saw it and will end long after it has passed us by. Each note emerges seamlessly from the one before and quietly slips away under the next, resulting in one resonant instrument capable of an infinite range of sounds.

_{Note by Alex Groves}

Alex Groves

Alex Groves is a British composer and curator working across contemporary classical and electronic music. His work blends classical instruments, ambient textures and live-processed electronics to create uncanny soundworlds where the line between acoustic and electronic, real and imagined becomes blurred.

Most recently, Alex self-released A Single Form, a track inspired by the monolithic artworks of Barbara Hepworth and created from highly-processed field recordings of the reed beds at Snape Maltings. Other recent work includes commissions for the National Opera Studio, London Contemporary Orchestra and Crash Ensemble, music theatre works for English Touring Opera and ERRATICA, and residencies with Handel & Hendrix in London, Snape Maltings, Endelienta, Wild Plum Arts and the New Amsterdam Composers Lab.
 
Alongside composing, Alex runs SOLO, a unique platform for leading contemporary classical soloists such as Daniel Pioro, Eliza McCarthy and Joby Burgess to explore the music they love in an intimate setting. Each gig features an eclectic setlist packed with formative influences, dream collaborations and new adventures, and gives audiences the chance to engage with the performers on a more personal level.

His music has been presented at the Barbican Centre, Sage Gateshead, Royal Opera House, V&A, Union Chapel, National Theatre Studio and King's Place, broadcast on NTS Radio, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 6 Music, and released on NonClassical and Bedroom Community.

Ancient sites (like Skara Brae and the Standing Stones of Stenness in Orkney) are so intriguing: they offer us amazement at the sheer age of artefacts, the many mysteries of why things were that way, and the sense of a delicate thread connecting us, now, to those people, then. Our interactions with these relics helps us build an image of our past, but there is only so much we can learn from what remains – the rest is lost to time.

In this piece I have sought to capture the strangeness, wonder, and melancholy of objects and sites that exist out of time: they retain traces and memories of the past, but have outlived those for and by whom they were built, and have been left behind.

_{Note by Lillie Harris}

Lillie Harris

Lillie Harris graduated from the Royal College of Music in 2016, where she studied composition with Haris Kittos and was awarded the Elgar Memorial Prize for her final portfolio. Musical from a young age, her interest in composing grew out of learning instruments, a flair for languages and a love of creative writing; as a result, narrative ideas and complex emotions are regular features in her pieces. Currently, she is particularly enjoying bringing her twin passions for text and music together in the form of new choral and vocal works.

Recent works include two choral pieces released on NMC Recordings in January 2020 as part of the NYCGB Young Composers scheme, an art song Kind Regards with librettist Laura Attridge that was premiered online by the Royal Opera House in March 2021, and a choral piece and trumpet fanfare premiered at the 2021 Cheltenham Music Festival through the Royal Philharmonic Society's Composers Programme.

Outside of composition, she writes the user manual for Steinberg’s notation software Dorico, sings with Covent Garden Chorus, and does engraving and copying work for publishers and film, TV, and game music recording sessions.

Drawing on the Greek philosopher Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the sculptural installation Plato’s Disco by artist David Batchelor is a rotating stalactite of stained glass triangles that projects endlessly changing colour patterns on the walls around it.

Bethan Morgan-Williams’ musical response to this sculpture, Traces of a Disco, is also gently mysterious. Soft, ragged chords give way to a mechanical dance. Drops of water in the cave? The reality behind Plato’s curtain? Or the far-off twinkle of a glitterball?

_{Note by Tim Rutherford-Johnson}

Bethan Morgan-Williams

Bethan Morgan-Williams (born 1992) is a composer who writes quirky, rhythmically intricate music. Described as 'marvellously oblique and obscure' (5against4) while being 'rooted in something ancient and folky' (The Telegraph), Bethan’s music finds motivation in the apogee of musical performance.

Bethan is currently based in mid-Wales, having studied predominantly with Gary Carpenter at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and Diderik Wagenaar at the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag. Recent collaborations include those with Elen Morgan-Williams (oboe), Carl Rosman (clarinet) and Ensemble Musikfabrik, with forthcoming performances at Darmstadt and Festival KLANG.