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Robbie Ellis  

Beatrice

Duration: 01' 00" Year: 2010, r. 2012
a short orchestral feature for cor anglais

  • Instrumentation
    solo cor anglais, flute, horn in F, strings
  • Programme Note

    In 2010, I co-wrote The Lover’s Knot with playwright Renee Liang as part of the 2010-2011 Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra Composer Workshops, which led to a performance with actor Stuart Devenie and conductor Kenneth Young. Stuart played the role of Walter Bolton, the last man given the death penalty in New Zealand, in the hours before his execution.

    Various instruments represent various characters in this story – clarinet for Bolton’s flighty paramour Florence, contrabassoon for the stench of death, and harmon-muted trombones for the justice system. Bolton’s ailing wife Beatrice is represented by extensive solos for the cor anglais. At the request of Lee Martelli, Education Manager of the APO, I excerpted one of these into a demonstration piece for an education concert.

  • Availability

Alex Taylor  

between

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 2011
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2232 2200 1perc harp piano strings
  • Programme Note

    you miss swimming in electric lights
    between your fingers, the sound of running water
    things you had forgotten, left behind:
    the chair legs you forgot to felt
    the ink-black shirt for every occasion.
    the perfect sentence continues to elude you

    between is both a musical exploration of acoustic spaces, and also a conversation between past and present, an interaction between my own compositional practice and that of a musical ancestor, the great New Zealand composer Anthony Watson (1933-1973). The shared musical material, from Watson’s Prelude and Allegro (1960) provides the platform on which this conversation takes place, encompassing musical worlds both lyrical and angular, grand and intimate. The poem above is my own.

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Ryan Youens  

Blimp

Duration: 02' 20" Year: 2011
A short, one movement work for orchestra

Natalie Hunt  

Cirrus

 Year: 2012
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2221; 1210; 2 perc. (bass drum, triangle, marimba); grand piano; strings

    n.b. Oboe 2 and Bassoon require a Vibraslap and Tambourine respectively. The piano requires 5-10mm metallic chain/s draped over the strings, from middle C to 2 octaves above.
  • Programme Note

    Cirrus was written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta.

    While writing, I was learning to sail and learning to better understand the weather. Often the blue sky would be streaked with cirrus; high cloud made of tiny ice particles, dancing to a secret wind. Before long, troops of cumulus would march beneath the cirrus, followed by towers of cumulonimbus and umbrellas.

    In writing this piece, I have sought to express the fragility, beauty, and inexorable movement of the clouds, particularly Cirrus.

  • Availability

David Hamilton  

Concertino for Oboe and Strings

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 2012
for solo oboe and string orchestra

  • Programme Note

    This short work grew out of the middle movement. Originally composed for violin and strings, “Memorial” was first performed in a version for oboe and strings by the chamber orchestra of St Mary’s College, Auckland. It was suggested I might like to expand this into a larger work for oboe and strings, given there was a fine young oboe player in the school.

    The completed concertino consists of a traditional three movement form: fast-slow-fast. The first movement has elements of Baroque period writing in it, including a short fugal section based on the opening melody. The second movement, “Memorial”, is a slow and poignant movement written at a time when New Zealand was experiencing a number of tragedies – the Pike River mining tragedy and the Christchurch earthquakes. The final movement, “Hoe-Down”, is a complete contrast, being a purely fun and rhythmic piece of writing suggesting the music of the old time western USA.

  • Availability

Robbie Ellis  

Fanfare 10

Duration: 05' 00" Year: 2010
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    3(picc).2.3(Eb,Bb,bass).2; 4.3.3.1; T+3; strings
  • Programme Note

    This is a good old-fashioned fanfare – an introductory piece to kick-start a concert. It’s based around what I believe to be engaging tunes, inspiring brass and a healthy dose of celebratory bells, filtered through my own rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities.

    Fanfare 10 was workshopped by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and conductor Luke Dollman as a finalist in the 2010 NZSO/Todd Corporation Young Composers Competition.

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Robbie Ellis  

General Intransigence

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 2012
for orchestra

Robbie Ellis  

In meinem letzten Leiden

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2012
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2[1.2/p]2[1.ca]22, 4210, timp., 1-2 perc., strings
  • Programme Note

    For the last 28 months of his life, the composer Robert Schumann was confined to an insane asylum in Endenich, now a neighbourhood of Bonn. In Musicophilia – Tales of Music and the Brain, author Oliver Sacks includes this gripping anecdote of Schumann’s last days: “Auditory hallucinations now overwhelmed him, degenerating first into ‘angelic,’ then into ‘demonic’ music, and finally into a single, ‘terrible’ note, an A, which played ceaselessly day and night, with unbearable intensity.”

    The line “so hilf Du mir, Herr Jesu Christ, in meinem letzten Leiden” (so help me, Lord Jesus Christ, in my last suffering) comes from a chorale harmonisation that Schumann composed at Endenich – some of the last music he ever wrote. This piece incorporates the chorale in both a quartet of horns and a quartet of cellos. There are also references to Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim, relating to Robert Schumann’s extensive use of musical ciphers and coded messages.

  • Availability

M Louise Webster  

Learning to nudge the wind

Duration: 10' 40" Year: 2010
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    Piccolo, Flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 Bsn, 2 Horns, 2 Trumpets, Timp, Percussion (marimba, susp. cymbal, triangle, tam-tam, metal wind-chimes), strings
  • Programme Note

    Aotearoa is a long narrow land surrounded by sea and buffeted by the wind. We who live here learn to know the direction of the prevailing winds and to track the changes in the sky and on the water. As a child visiting grandparents in Wellington I was mesmerised by the evanescent sweep of wind and wave patterns on the harbour surface as gusts blew silver and black across the water. I listened to the adults talk; they spoke of ‘southerly changes’, of ‘squalls’, and of the wind ‘going around to the south’. A new language that conjured images of a dynamic interchange with the wind. The line ‘learning to nudge the wind’ is taken from a Stella McQueen poem, and captures for me that relationship. ‘Learning to nudge the wind’ was written for St. Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra and had its first performance in May 2010.

  • Availability

Simon Eastwood  

Quanta

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 2011
for sinfonietta

  • Instrumentation
    1(picc.).1.1(b.cl).1, 1.1.1.0, pno. perc (glk,xyl, roto-toms) strings (1.1.1.1.1)
  • Programme Note

    A quantum in general could be considered to be a small defined amount of anything; for instance, if one were to consider the grains of sand of a beach, the smallest amount of sand would be a single grain. One grain could therefore be considered a quantum of sand. However, the term takes on a slightly more specific role when we start talking about small discrete packets of energy. I had the idea for this piece when I was reading about the nature of light quanta (photons) and in particular the idea that light can be considered to be both a particle and a wave. What appears to us to be a continuous beam can also be seen as a stream of discrete packets of energy. When discussing light quanta, Einstein uses the analogy of a sea wall being eroded by either ocean waves or a shower of bullets. Musically, this image suggested to me the idea of small fragments that evolve and then merge to together, eventually condensing down to a single note. The form of the piece at its most basic level is therefore a progression from discontinuity towards continuity.

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