A composer of ferocious dramatic instincts
— Alex Ross
I’m delighted to have been awarded a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, USA. The residency will be for 10 weeks from June–August 2025. I’ll be there to start work on my next large-scale opera project, which has a tangential connection to Taos, NM. More information about the Helen Wurlitzer Foundation is here.
I’m delighted to have been awarded a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa, Italy for one month in March/April 2025. I’ll be there to work on ideas for new pieces, doing some research and sketching out new material. More information about the Bogliasco Centre is here.
Staatstheater Mainz has just announced a new production of 4.48 Psychosis in the 2024/25 season. The production will be directed by Rahel Thiel and conducted by Samuel Hogarth. The premiere will be on 26th April 2025 in the small house. More details and tickets available here.
The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions has just been announced in this year’s Ruhrtriennale in Bochum, Germany. Four performances will take place from 17th—20th August 2024 in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum. It’s an exciting festival programme, covering theatre, music, dance and art, and I’m delighted that we get to share the festival with so many artists I admire, such as Isabelle Huppert, Romeo Castellucci, PJ Harvey, Kirill Serebrennikov and Marlene Freitas, and many others to discover.
I’m delighted to announce our next opera, We Are The Lucky Ones.
The opera is commissioned by Dutch National Opera, and it will premiere at the Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam on 14th March 2025. I am writing it with Ted Huffman and playwright Nina Segal. It will be my first opera with orchestra, conducted by Bassem Akiki. We have a stellar cast: Claron McFadden, Jacquelyn Stucker, Nina van Essen, Helena Rasker, Miles Mykkanen, Frederick Ballentine, Germán Olvera and Alex Rosen.
The press release says: “We Are The Lucky Ones tells the story of a generation. It is based on interviews with more than 70 people in Western Europe who were born in between 1940 and 1949. It is the story of people who started out life with little, who experienced ever-improving living standards and are now leaving behind a world where such growth is no longer sustainable. Their memories form a collective time capsule of the past eighty years, told as one continuous life story in music theatre form. Following individual experiences and societal changes over the decade, the opera raises crucial about the relationship between the private and the political, the impact of our choices and what truly matters in the end.”
Tickets will be available in August.
The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions has just been announced in this year’s Holland Festival in Amsterdam. The performances will take place on 13th and 14th June 2024 in the Muziekgebouw. It’s a wonderful festival to be part of, covering theatre, music, dance and art, and I’m delighted that we get to share the festival with so many artists I admire, such as Marina Abramović, Dries Verhoeven, Forced Entertainment and Trajal Harrell, and other artists that I’m excited to discover.
Answer Machine Tape, 1987 has been shortlisted for the Small Chamber Composition category of the 2023 Ivors Classical Awards. The awards ceremony will take place at the British Film Institute on the South Bank in London on 14th November 2023. The other shortlisted composers are Newton Armstrong, Matthew Grouse, Josephine Stephenson and Larry Goves.
Theater Erfurt has announced its new production of Denis & Katya in the coming 23/24 season, The production of the german-language translation by Robert Lehmeier will be directed by Markus Weckesser, and will take place in the round in the Studio.Box venue. The premiere will be on 1st Feburary 2024. Tickets and further information is available here.
Denis & Katya will have its Danish premier on Thursday 17th August (schools performance) and Friday 18th August 2023 (public performance) as part of the Aalborg Opera Festival. This is a brand new production by Kind Of Opera, created by director Selma Mongelard and creative producer Trine Heide. The production then moves to Copenhagen for more shows at the Folketeatret on 25th and 26th August. More info and tickets are available here: https://kindofopera.dk/projekter/deniskatya.
The team is:
Soprano: Katinka Fogh Vindelev
Baritone: David Kragh Danving
Celli Marie Louise Lind, Kirstine Elise Pedersen, Marta Gudmundsdottir, Mihai Fagarasan
Musical Direction: Ian Ryan
Director: Selma Mongelard
Lighting design: Malte Hauge
Sound design: Tommy Kamp Vestergaard (…who also produced the wonderful recording of My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variations)
Producer: Trine Heide
Photo by Allan Toft for Kind Of Opera.
On the same day as our wonderful premiere of Denis & Katya in Pittsburgh, Musiktheater an der Wein announced their new production of Denis & Katya to open their 2023/24 season at the Wiener Kammeroper. The production of the german-language translation by Robert Lehmeier will be directed by Marcos Darbyshire, featuring Hasti Molavian and Timothy Connor. The premiere will be on 27th September 2023. Tickets and further information is available here.
I will also be leading a public masterclass with the performers on 3rd September. Tickets for that are available here.
Denis & Katya has been cited as in the top ten most performed contemporary operas across the world in the last seven years. The citation has come from a wide survey of performances of opera made in collaboration between Operabase and the Fedora platform.
Denis & Katya has so far had productions in Philadelphia, Wales/London, Montpellier, Cambridge, Hannover, Amsterdam and Helsinki, with more productions on the way in Pittsburgh, Hannover (revival), Copenhagen and Vienna.
More information about the study can be found here. Ted Huffman also ranks as in the worldwide top three stage directors making productions of new opera in the last seven years.
Denis & Katya won the Fedora Prize in 2019.
Opera Company Taite, Finnish National Opera and Musica Nova Helsinki have just announced their co-production of Denis & Katya on 8th, 10th, & 11th March 2023 at the Arminsali at Finnish National Opera, Helsinki. Opera Company Taite is making a new version of the opera in Finnish, for this Finnish premiere, directed and translated by Johanna Freundlich with light and video design by Janne Teivainen. The two performers will be Mari Palo and Ville Rusanen.
Pittsburgh Opera has just announced its 2022/23 Season, including performances of Denis & Katya on 6th, 9th, 12th, 14th, & 20th May 2023. They will be performing the Opera Philadelphia premiere production that we made in September 2019, with direction by Ted Huffman, design and light by Andrew Lieberman, video by Pierre Martin, sound design by Rob Kaplowitz, costumes by Millie Hiibel and dramaturgy by Ksenia Ravvina. The performances will take place in the George R White Theatre at the BItz Opera Factory. Cast yet to be announced.
Some production images from the Ensemble Intercontemporain concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis, December 2021, at the Philharmonie de Paris as part of the portrait of my work in the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The ensemble was conducted by Matthias Pintscher, the singers were Gweneth-Ann Rand, Robyn Allegra Parton, Karen Bandelow, Samantha Price, Rachael Lloyd and Lucy Schaufer, with video by Pierre Martin and Mise-en-Espace by Elayce Ismail. All images by Quentin Chevrier. They can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credit.
The Philharmonie de Paris have just released this trailer video in advance of the concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis there on Thursday 16th December with Ensemble Intercontemporain, in a co-production with the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The 9-minute video features a short interview with me about the piece, and some clips of the staged production from Strasbourg.
An article about 4.48 Psychosis has just been published in the Tempo journal of new music, written by Tom Crathorne, about the interaction between music and libretto. The full article is available here. This is the abstract:
Some production images from the Opéra Orchestre National de Montpellier production of Denis & Katya, July 2021. Directed by Ted Huffman, design and lighting by Andrew Lieberman, video by Pierre Martin, music direction by Tim Anderson, sound by Max Hunter. The performers featured in the photos are Chloé Briot and Elliot Madore with the cellists of the Orchestre National de Montpellier. All images taken by Marc Ginot. They can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credit.
A Photograph — a little piece I wrote last year for the Hermes Experiment with playwright Cordelia Lynn — will be appear on the group’s forthcoming album, SONG. The album is on Delphian Records, and will be released on 22nd October. It is available to pre-order here.
A Photograph was commissioned by the Oxford Lieder Festival for their 2020 Festival, specifically for The Hermes Experiment. It was my first collaboration with playwright Cordelia Lynn, and was based on a photograph that was found in my parents’ attic while our old family home was being cleared out — a photo of my mum in her early 20s with two friends, on holiday. Cordelia (who didn’t know of what or whom the photo was) wrote a text based on her invented back-story of the photo.
Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam have announced that they will make a new production of Denis & Katya in the Opera Forward Festival 2022. The Festival features a range of new operatic each year in March in a range of venues in Amsterdam. The cast is yet to be announced, but the production is a collaboration with the Young Artists Studio at Dutch National Opera.
I will be making a brand new 42-speaker sound installation at the Church of Saint Eustache in Paris as part of this years Festival d’Automne à Paris. The installation, Venables plays Bach, explores my relationship with J.S. Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor, BWV 940. This Prelude was one of the earliest pieces I learnt to play on the piano when I was a teenager, and a piece that, over the last 25 years almost without exception, I have played as a warm up every time I sit down at the piano to compose. This installation is a kind of ‘composing diary’ recorded over about 50 days earlier this year, while I was writing numbers 96–100, also commissioned by the Festival d’Automne. These ‘diary entries’ form a kind of meta-composing-session, consisting of my improvisations, repetitions, explorations of the musical material for the new piece, growing out from and catalysed by the Bach Prelude.
In addition to the installation, I’ve made a 30-minute durational ‘unfolding’ of the Bach Prelude, to be performed live on the organ in Saint Eustache by Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard, on the evenings of 8th and 15th October. This is not really a new piece, so to speak, but more a live element of the installation: a conceptual performance based on a pitch-frequency analysis of the Bach Prelude and an exponential revealing of all 170 pitches in the Prelude over the course of 28 repetitions of it.
Venables plays Bach opens on 7th October at 2.30pm and is open every day until 16th October inclusive from 2.30pm–5pm. Entry is free. The organ performances are also free but require prior registration due to covid rules.
numbers 96–100 and numbers 81–85 have been commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Music Festival Strasbourg and the ensemble Lovemusic, and will be premiered in these festivals on 1st (Strasbourg) and 26th October (Paris) by Lovemusic with mezzo-soprano Grace Durham.