Luke Bedford
Nightingale (2011)
By the screen in the Sun at the hill on the gold (2008)
Chiaroscuro (2002-2005)
Man shoots strangers from skyscrapers (2002)
Or voit tout en aventure (2005-2006)

Lawrence Power, alto
Scottish Ensemble

Cheryl Crockett, premier violon
Liza Johnson, premier violon
Tristan Gurney, premier violon
Xander van Vliet, deuxième violon
Joanne Green, deuxième violon
Laura Ghiro, deuxième violon
Katrina Lee, deuxième violon
Fiona Winning, alto
Andrew Berridge, alto
Alison Lawrance, violoncelle
Naomi Boole-Masterson, violoncelle
violoncelle
Diane Clark, contrebasse
Katy Mackintosch, hautbois
Mary James, hautbois
Sue Baxendale, cor
Jamie Shield, cor

Jonathan Morton, violon et direction
Ensemble Modern

Dietmar Wiesner, flûte
Chrisitian Hommel, hautbois
Nina Janssen-Deinzer, clarinette
Udo Grimm, clarinette
Johannes Schwarz, basson
Saar Berger, cor
Valentin Gravie, trompette
Sava Stoianov, trompette
Uwe Dierksen, trombone
Hermann Kretzschmar, piano
Rumi Ogawa, batterie
David HAller, batterie
Jagdish Mistry, violon
Giorgios Panagiotidis, violon
Patrick Jüdt, alto
Eva Böcker, violoncelle
Michael M. Kasper, violoncelle
Hans Joachim Tinnefeld, contrebasse

Sian Edwards, direction
Franck Ollu, direction
Fidelio Trio

Darragh Morgan, violon
Robin Michael, violoncelle
Mary Dullea, piano

London Sinfonietta

Sebastian Bell, flûte
Christopher O'Neal, hautbois
Mark van de Wiel, clarinette
John Oxford, basson
Michael Thompson, cor
Bruce Nockles, trompette
David Purser, trombone
David Alberman, violon
Joan Atherton, violon
Paul Silverthorne, alto
Tim Gill, violoncelle
Enno Senft, contrebasse
Helen Tunstall, harpe
Ian Watson, accoréon
Alex NEal, batterie
Sam Walton, batterie

Oliver Knussen, direction

Recentrage ou élargissement, concentration ou expansion, voilà le type de dynamiques diamétralement opposées qui caractérisent la musique de Luke Bedford. Son œuvre démontre l’intérêt marqué du compositeur pour le souci du détail, mais atteint sa qualité tonale spécifique de la multiplication de ces éléments et de leur transfert vers un dispositif plus vaste. C’est dans ce cadre que Luke Bedford laisse exprimer sa fantaisie lorsqu’il compose, véritable laboratoire dans lequel il explore de nouvelles possibilités sonores. C’est cette immersion dans des détails qui captivent, leur reproduction et leur dérivation à grande envergure, ses textures orchestrales et sa technique de composition qui rendent fascinante la musique de Luke Bedford.

Focussing and magnification, concentration and expansion – these are the sort of diametrically opposed dynamics that characteristically pervade Luke Bedford’s music. On the one hand his music demonstrates a pronounced interest in details and individual traditional gestures, in trouvailles from traditional sources; on the other hand it attains its specific tonal quality from the multiplication of these gestures and their transferral to a large apparatus. This – be it an orchestra or an ensemble – seems to be the ancestral home of Luke Bedford’s compositional fantasy, a laboratory in which he explores new tonal possibilities and fathoms the potential of the gestures and movement patterns they are based on. In By the Screen in the Sun at the Hill on the Gold (2008), for example, a simple arpeggio figure dominates the musical cross-section and the musical progress. Its manifold rhythmical variations and their multiple layers produce sometimes glistening, sometimes more subtle colour patches, before the figure finally loses its – in any case variable – physiognomy and becomes noise. / The musical happenings in this and in other works by Luke Bedford are invented directly from the instrumental apparatus: figure, timbre and harmony form a complex unity that makes the differentiation between primary and secondary parameters obsolete. And the elementary difference between horizontal and vertical, between line and chord dissipates under the predominantly timbre-oriented approach – as in the first pieces from Bedford’s song cycle Or Voit Tout En Aventure (2005/06): the instrumentalised tones of the vocal melody accumulate as they appear and become accompanying chords, sound and line are entwined. The same goes for Outblaze the Sky (2006), where the orchestral emphasis results from the potentialisation of a quasi-Mahlerian gesture. The immersion in captivating details, their reproduction and the derivation of large-scale, genuinely orchestral textures from them – this compositional technique brings forth the subjectless intensity, as it were, that makes Luke Bedford’s music so fascinating.