Landscape piece
MUSICAL EFFECT MADE AUDIENCE THINK SEAGULLS WERE IN THE CATHEDRAL
ANEW work by royal composer Paul Mealor is being premiered at a top music festival. The concerto written by Professor Mealor, one of the world’s most performed living composers, who was born in St Asaph and raised in Connah’s Quay, was jointly commissioned by the North Wales International Music Festival. The event is being held in a hybrid format for the very first time this year and resumed virtually last week.
Prof Mealor, who divides his time between composing and teaching at the University of Aberdeen, wrote the piano concerto after being jointly commissioned by the festival and the
JAM on the Marsh Festival in Kent.
The concerto was performed before a live audience for the first time at the festival’s traditional home, St Asaph Cathedral, last month before a sell-out audience.
It was filmed and will play an important part in the festival which resumed as an online festival, starting on November 15, with the concerts free to watch.
Paul, snatching a quick break between writing musical pieces for several television productions, said he was overjoyed to hear the concerto being performed in the cathedral by pianist John Frederick Hudson and the NEW Sinfonia conducted by Robert Guy.
The concerto, Paul’s second, is one long movement, lasting just over 20 minutes and subdivided into three sections.
He said: “The piece is a landscape piece and very slow moving. It plots a day really starting with sunrise and there’s a storm in the middle of it and gradually it becomes more complicated as the piece goes on. The end is so difficult to play there is nothing else to do but stop.
“People should listen out for the unusual things in it. There’s a huge amount of percussion.”
Paul added there’s also an unusual instrument, a flexatone, being played in the concerto.
It is metal instrument which makes a weird sound. It is a small flexible metal sheet suspended in a wire frame ending in a handle and its sound is comparable to the musical saw,” he explained. Screeching seagulls however are created by the cellists playing a harmonic glissando effect on one of the instrument’s four strings.
Paul commented: “At the performance in the cathedral there were people turning round to look if they were inside the building.”
For more information about the resumption of the North Wales International Music Festival online with the concerts free to watch from November 15 visit www.nwimf.com.