Terry Riley premiere for Cameron Carpenter and the BBC Concert Orchestra
Victoria Peet
Marketing Officer, BBC London Performing Groups
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Cameron Carpenter
This Saturday the BBC Concert Orchestra will give the UK premiere of Terry Riley’s organ concerto At the Royal Majestic with virtuoso Cameron Carpenter in a concert dedicated to visionary American composers.
A true maverick, Cameron Carpenter smashes the stereotypes of organists and organ music – all the while generating worldwide acclaim and controversy. To find out more about our soloist, we asked what was on his playlist and why; here’s what he said:
Charles Ives / Henry Brant: A Concord Symphony - San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas
Among the many iconoclastic American composers who expanded the possibilities of music in the 20th century, Charles Ives is probably the most important. The orchestration of his 'Concord Sonata', originally for piano, was itself a project of more than three decades' work by another American original, the composer Henry Brant.
This excellent recording is a one-stop shop not only for a crash course in the American orchestral sound, but also for the idea of appropriation and mixing of influences that is so important in 20th century music.
It's exactly this sense of having a right to make the music your own, that also enabled me to make my own version for organ of the same work by Ives, of which the third movement ('The Alcotts) will be heard on this concert.
Aaron Copland: Symphony No. 3 for Organ & Orchestra - Sony Classical: Bernstein Century. The New York Philharmonic / Leonard Bernstein; E. Power Biggs, organ.
No serious discussion of American music, and especially of the delicate task of integrating the organ into orchestral forces, could be without a serious listening to this remarkable work, written when Copland was 23 and premiered with Nadia Boulanger at the organ. In its craggy, jagged edges it foreshadows some of the darker moments of Terry's much larger and more sprawling work.
Percy Grainger: In A Nutshell Suite: Arrival Platform Humlet - BBC Philharmonic / Richard Hickox
Grainger's music is so important to me in its scope, in its childlike view of the world and in its freshness. He's so often overlooked as a serious composer - even today - that it's not often appreciated how original some of his concepts were.
In 'Arrival Platform Humlet', for example, we see perhaps the first major orchestral work written entirely in unisons. As far as I'm aware, it's still the best. Here's another early twentieth-century voice bringing us something remarkable.
Terry Riley
It's incredibly important to understand Terry Riley's rather wild musical history in order to have an appreciation of just what a stylistic departure his new work (At The Royal Majestic) is. There are certainly little moments in Persian Surgery Dervishes that seem to be retained in some way in the new piece, but the new work is shockingly Romantic by comparison to the works that we've come to know Terry for, and which with La Monte Young and others influenced several generations of musicians in many musical genres.
Cameron Carpenter performs Terry Riley’s organ concerto At the Royal Majestic in the BBC Concert Orchestra’s Visions of the New concert, Saturday 18 October 7.30pm at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. Find out more.
