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Spoleto Festival Features Jonny Greenwood and Tansy Davies

Apr. 26, 2012

Spoleto Festival Features Jonny Greenwood and Tansy Davies

The 2012 Spoleto Festival’s vast music, theatre and dance offerings includes the work of two the most vital members of the young generation of English composers, Jonny Greenwood and Tansy Davies. On June 3, John Kennedy leads the Spoleto Festival Orchestra through the American premiere of Greenwood’s 48 Responses to Polymorphia, and the composer’s 2012 brooding orchestral work Doghouse. Released in March, 2011 on the Nonesuch recording Krzysztof Penderecki/Jonny Greenwood, 48 Responses is the composer’s acknowledgement of his debt to the Polish master’s powerful, iconic work from his early period.

The Observer’s Stephen Pritchard writes on the album:

Penderecki'sThrenody (1960) still has the power to shock, while Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver(2005) is already a modern classic. His 48 Responses is as surprising as it is original, taking the one brief moment of tonality in Penderecki's Polymorphia.


A full digest of reviews can be read here.

Spoleto’s Music in Time series closes with the program “Dramas” on June 7, featuring Tansy Davies’s Grind Show (unplugged). Inspired by the work of Francisco Goya, Davies breathlessly superimposes musical interpretations of two Goya scenes over one another to striking effect. Davies writes:

Grind Show is a superimposition of two scenes: the foreground in a bawdy dance hall, and the background a rainy landscape at night. The acoustic instruments play out a drama with a dialogue of irregular dances, while the electronics depict a sinister outside world.

While composing Grind Show I saw a painting by Goya The St Isidore Pilgrimage, which shows a crowd of debauched and frightened revellers appearing to flee across the hills from a distant town. It’s painted over an earlier landscape on which, in turn, the figures were superimposed.


Grind Show is included on the Nonclassical portrait album just released in April, 2011, available for purchase here.

More on the music of Tansy Davies and Jonny Greenwood is located at www.fabermusic.com.

For precise concert information, please visit www.spoletousa.org.

Learn more on Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki’s collaborations at www.pendereckigreenwood.com.

Jonny Greenwood
48 Responses to Polymorphia (2011)
for 48 solo strings
24vn.8 va.8 vc.8 db
19'

Doghouse (2009)
for string trio and orchestra
solo violin, viola, cello; 2.2.2.2-4.3.3.1-3perc-hp-str
23’

Tansy Davies
Grind Show (unplugged) (2008)
for chamber ensemble
flute, clarinet, prepared piano, violin, cello
6’

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