Shades of Light: Concert @ Bloomsbury Festival

"When artists get together, they discuss money." (Oscar Wilde) - oh fellow artists, here we meet again!

 

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Support our Shades of Light // Concert @ Bloomsbury Festival, which marks the culmination of Ensemble Matters's and their collaborators' yearlong preparation! This concert is presented by Bloomsbury Festival and takes place on 22 October 2021 (Fri), 7:30pm BST at the Conway Hall, London. Tickets available both live and via live-stream.

 

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With all the budget cuts in the arts sector today, raising fund for a concert has become difficult. Sadly, despite much effort and countless sleepless nights, we have not managed to secure sufficient funding like before for our upcoming Shades of Light // Concert @ Bloomsbury Festival. What this means is we are unable to ensure fair pay for:

 

 

We genuinely love and believe in what we do, but this does not mean we can do it for free indefinitely. Most of us are emerging artists and there is only so much we could do before having to start worrying about the bread and butter in life...

 

Our wish is simple. We hope you would consider supporting our work. Your donation will make this concert a meaningful happening. Any amount is welcome, starting from £5. That way, we will be able to pay our composers, visual artists, and musicians - or at least get them a beer afterwards! - who have all dedicated so much of their time to this very unique concert and certainly deserve people's respect.

We will thank you in ways that we can - more to follow individually once donation has been made. Due to GoFundMe's terms and condition, we are only allowed to send thank-you notes via this platform.

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What is this concert all about?

 

Well, what does "Shades of Light" mean to you? This concert attempts to give it a go. The programme has been carefully curated around Ensemble Matters's 2021 theme of “Shades of Light ”, which has inspired our creatives to put forward their interpretations, both literally and metaphorically.

 

Amy Crankshaw’s new composition, Golden Hour, musicalises the natural environment and explores the sonic equivalent of how different shades of light affect one’s perception of the surrounding environment. This grows out of her current doctoral research on landscapes in music, where she investigates the relationships between experiences of physical natural environments and composition practices. Amy's piece forms a perfect diptych with Tristan Murail’s Thirteen Colours of the Setting Sun (1978) in our programme, as the latter likewise musicalises natural phenomena, as the title suggests.

 

Katabasis, or "descent to the underworld", is a short film by Ian McNaught Davis (film) and Owen Ho (music). It takes the theme "Shades of Light" both literally and metaphorically, bringing spectators to the underworld via a characterful blend of analogue & digital films and hand-drawn animations. The film features black-and-white footage shot at Abney Park, a 180-year-old cemetery in London, working in tandem with the music that is made out of various field recordings from the no less historic Mecklenburgh Square Garden, with its kaleidoscopic sounds of peregrine falcons, branches, leaves, wind, grass, etc.

 

On a metaphorical level, Alondra Ruiz-Hernandez’s short film, Isle of the Dead, interprets "Shades of Light" as the different conditions of human existence. It follows the long trajectory of Rachmaninoff's tone poem, which had inspired the film and likewise entitled Isle of the Dead, exploring what it means to exist as humans. The film will be screened to the live performance of Rachmaninoff’s music (chamber arrangement by Owen Ho). Despite their deathly titles, both Alondra's and Rachmaninoff's works, 112 years apart, see momentarily sparks of life amidst an impending doom, urging us to reflect on the intricacies between life and death.

The music will be performed by Ensemble Matters -

Flute: Beth Stone
Clarinet: Fran Cervera
Piano: Mikaela Livadiotis
Violin: Sherry Shen
Cello: Edward Deakins
Percussion: Francisco Negreiros
Conductor: Owen Ho

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