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Gavin Bryars' The Bulls of Bashan at Spoleto Festival USA

May. 04, 2009

Festival season will soon be in full swing, and the Spoleto Festival USA kicks off another summer season full of music from the Schott Music/EAM catalogue as they present Gavin Bryars' violin concerto The Bulls of Bashan on May 23. Spoleto Artistic Associate John Kennedy leads the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra through the concerto which was commissioned by the Primavera Chamber Orchestra. Bryars elaborates:

The Violin Concerto, scored for solo violin and strings alone, was commissioned by the Primavera Chamber Orchestra for its leader Paul Manley and is the second piece that I have written for them. The first, The Porazzi Fragment, for 21 solo strings, came about because of my admiration for the approach that the orchestra takes to performance–playing without a conductor, in effect as chamber musicians. In the case of the concerto I did not want to write a virtuoso show-piece, but rather to draw on the orchestra's alertness as an ensemble. The solo part is essentially lyrical and there is no cadenza as such. But I was also conscious of the fact that, as with a baroque concerto, the soloist may also direct the work–and does so here.

Bryars makes extensive use of string mutes, which led to the title being taken from a passage in Cecil Forsyth's book on orchestration where the composer and musicologist scorns the use of muted strings and claims the inventors of such devices as "thick as the bulls in Bashan." The Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra performs Gavin Bryars' The Bulls of Bashan on Saturday, May 23 in the recital hall of the Simons Center for the Performing Arts in Charleston, South Carolina.

For more on Gavin Bryars, visit www.schott-music.com and www.gavinbryars.com.

Learn more on the Spoleto Festival USA by visiting www.spoletousa.org.

Gavin Bryars
The Bulls of Bashan (2000)
for violin and strings
strings (5.5.4.4.2 preferred; 2.2.2.2.2 min)
23'

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