Philip Venables

A composer of ferocious dramatic instincts
— Alex Ross

Author: phil

  • ‘Signals’ featuring the Metamorphoses after Britten

    ‘Signals’ featuring the Metamorphoses after Britten

    I just received a copy of the Signals volume of new music for oboe. It features my Metamorphoses after Britten in it, and I also designed the front cover.

    The volume was edited by the amazing Melinda Maxwell, for whom I wrote my Metamorphoses, and John Stringer an oboist-composer.  It’s now available on musicroom.com.

    If you play the oboe, go out and buy it now — it’s got a great selection of stuff in it.  And not all of it that difficult either.  Very suitable for Grade 7-8 upwards to university/conservatoire/professional, I think.

  • Wonderful reviews of numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

    Wonderful reviews of numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

    numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde was performed brilliantly by EXAUDI and Endymion under the direction of James Weeks on Monday 19th September.  I was really delighted, and the Purcell Room at Southbank was pretty busy too.

    There was a wonderful 4-star review by Guy Dammann in the Guardian the following day.  It said

    Venables’s text is an extract from Simon Howard’s surreal epic Numbers, concerning a swarm of wasps sculpted into a bust of the Marquis de Sade and presented to the local police. The music is duly playful and occasionally disturbing. The sound image of a face forming from shapeless buzzing was beautifully achieved, as was the concluding high G sustained by the soprano, capturing a nicely pared-down Liebestod.

    Seen and Heard were also reviewing the concert, and had great stuff to say about my piece:

    Numbers 76-80: Tristan und Isolde, by Philip Venables, began in a striking fashion with the quartet bashing out perfect fifths fortissimo; as the piece develops the excellent EXAUDI singers spoke most of Simon Howard’s strangely exciting if rather baffling poem. There’s genuine wit here, and pathos, and really terrifically flamboyant writing for the instrumentalists. What a thrilling moment there was when the singers suddenly burst into song rather than the spoken word! This composer is gaining a great reputation for original and sometimes quite brutally exhilarating music, and it’s well worth watching out for him.

    Read the full Guardian review here.  And the Seen and Heard review here.

  • Contrasts in Space

    Contrasts in Space

    So – very busy at the moment with a number of big projects that I’ll be telling you about in the next few weeks, hopefully. But this week I’ve been working on a short instrumental + tape piece to accompany this short film by Sebastian Schmidt. Obviously it won’t have that sound on it, but rather my live-performed piece to go with it.

    The piece has been commissioned by Ensemble Amorpha for their Amorpha_Shorts programme, and they’re premiering the pieces at the British Film Institute on 1st December 2011.  Do go along if you’re around on that night!  Lots of other good composers are involved too, like my very good friend and Berlin buddy, Naomi Pinnock.

  • …dark and violent, and so so gay.

    …dark and violent, and so so gay.

    Last week’s performance of Fuck Forever was reviewed by www.sosogay.com.

    “There were some really great little works in among the chaff….. Philip Venables’ Fuck Forever managed to tease out a dark and violent portrait of sexual desire.”

    Definitely a line I will quote in my biography!

    Check out the full review here.

     

  • Fuck Forever, video from Tete-a-Tete festival

    Fuck Forever, video from Tete-a-Tete festival

    Fuck forever from Philip Venables on Vimeo.

    My 3-minute Six Word Opera was premiered last week (11th and 12th August) at Riverside Studios in London, as part of the Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival.  It was performed by the wonderful John Savournin (speaker/singer), James Young (piano and MD), Rosalind Acton (cello) and Matthew West (woodblock).  Check out this video of one of the performances.

    James Young asked me to write one for the second year of the successful Six Word Opera project.  As almost all of my recent pieces have involved spoken word in concert music (I —- the body electric, numbers 91-95, numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde, The Schmürz all in the last 12 months), this seemed a great way to try out some ideas.  Also a good testing ground for the project that I am working on with Jorge Balça and Omar Ebrahim which is also a mini-opera, semi-staged, with themes of sex, sexuality and violence.

  • BBC Radio 3, In Tune, with Phoenix Piano Trio

    BBC Radio 3, In Tune, with Phoenix Piano Trio

    Wonderful news: one of the movements (the Scherzo) from my new piano trio, Klaviertrio im Geiste, will be performed live on BBC Radio 3 on Friday afternoon, 10th June, from about 4.45pm.  It’ll be performed by the Phoenix Piano Trio as part of a performance and interview about their Beyond Beethoven series.

    They very nicely commissioned me last year to write this new trio, as a companion to Beethoven’s Ghost trio, which they’ll perform together with my piece at The Forge in Camden, London, on Wednesday evening, 8th June, and in Oxford at theHolywell Music Room on Saturday 11th June.

    It feels like this piece is a big compositional step forwards for me: lots more process-based musical structure and much more clarity and simplicity than earlier pieces.  It feels like a very positive change. So I’m particularly excited to hear it realised.

    UPDATE:

    You can listen again on iPlayer for the next 5 days – click here.

    The Phoenix are on from the beginning, and the bit with me in starts from about 12:45 minutes in.

  • ‘FLIPP’ premiere. Unerhörte Musik, Berlin.

    ‘FLIPP’ premiere. Unerhörte Musik, Berlin.

    Well – a few weeks ago I went along to the premiere at Unerhörte Musik in Berlin, of my new short saxophone duo, Flipp, which I wrote for Christoph Enzel and Adrian Tully.  I have to say that the piece was written very quickly, after coming back from a slew of concerts in London just the week before the concert. It pretty much only uses two notes for most of the piece.  They played it BRILLIANTLY – and i was pretty happy with the piece.  I haven’t put up the info page here for it yet, but there is a recording of this piece here.  It works really good with headphones, to get the stereo effects between the two players. (In live performance they stand at opposite sides of the stage.) Check it out.

    Flipp, for two saxophones (2011) by philipvenables

    Christoph also played my Metamorphoses after Britten on soprano sax – rather wonderfully too.  The acoustic in the BKA Theater in Berlin is as dry as a bone, which affects how resonant and harmonic the slow movements sound, but the fast movements in there sounded punchy and clear and really energetic.  I really hope Christoph and i can record them properly sometime, to go alongside the wonderful recording of Melinda Maxwell playing the oboe version of the pieces.

    Anyway – I look forward to working with these two amazing players again soon!