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Julian Anderson's Nunca vi Granada Premiered by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Nov. 21, 2022

Under the baton of Stephan Meier, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group premiered Julian Anderson's Nunca vi Granada on November 20 at The Bradshaw Hall, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Julian Anderson provides insight into the genesis of his powerful new work,

"The Spanish poet Rafael Alberti was invited several times as a young man by his great contemporary Federico Garcia Lorca to go with him to visit Lorca’s favourite locations in Granada (notably the Alhambra Palace). Alberti was never able to make the trip. Then the Spanish Civil War erupted: Lorca, a passionate anti-Fascist, was arrested and shot. Alberti fled Spain and remained in exile for the next 40 years. He bitterly regretted the death of his great friend, and looked back with longing on those never-fulfilled invitations to Granada.

While in exile, Alberti wrote his ‘Ballad of One Who Never Went to Granada’ and it is this that I have set in my piece Nunca Vi Granada. The text is self-explanatory and I have set it clearly and directly. It is filled with images of regret, yearning and love for both Lorca and Spain, and above all for a Granada which, at the time of writing, Alberti had never seen. Having lamented the violent death of Lorca, the poem ends on a note of hope in which Alberti affirms that he will, one day, see Granada. And in 1984, long after Lorca’s death, he did."

The program also included Julian Anderson's Tombeauand Katherine Balch's New Geometry. 

Julian Anderson describes Tombeau: "Tombeau sets the famous sonnet Debussy’s friend Stephane Mallarme wrote to honour a writer they both hugely admired, Edgar Allan Poe. Two of Debussy’s unfinished opera projects were to have been settings of Poe tales, so it seemed very appropriate to use Mallarme’s memorial sonnet as a memorial for Debussy himself. The sonnet is one of the poet’s most beautiful and includes a memorable line in which Mallarme likens Poe’s tombstone to a “calm block torn down to earth from some obscure disaster” – as if it were some kind of bizarre meteorite...

My setting uses the instruments employed by composers in La Revue musicale's Debussy memorial, minus the guitar used by Manuel de Falla. Perhaps for that reason, in both the opening and closing of the work the ensemble is transformed into an imaginary giant guitar. Tombeau was requested by Stephan Meier to whom it is dedicated."

Listen to Ring Dance (1987):

Ring Dance/Julian Anderson/David Alberman and Clare Duckworth, violins.

Katherine Balch notes, "New Geometry takes its title from a scene in Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia. In this scene, young Thomasina Coverly discovers a recursive function that allows her to graph the intimate design of an apple leaf, which she calls “New Geometry of Irregular Forms.” Thomasina’s math allows her to zoom into the miniscule veins and fine details of a shape that appears very simple to the naked eye. In my piece, I play with the opposite process: zooming out from compact gestures through the harmonic trajectory of the piece, which passes from microtonal to chromatic to diatonic landscapes. But this exploration is not as bound to a strict process as Thomasina’s math. As another character remarks, “real data is messy,” and in the search for mathematical truth, “it’s all very noisy out there, very hard to spot the tune...the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” This piece was premiered by Ensemble Intercontemporain on June 27, 2015 at Centquatre, Paris, France as an octet, and later revised for 13 players for Contemporaneous.


Contemporaneous performs the world premiere of the revised version of Katherine Balch's
New Geometry (2015, arr. 2016).


To learn more about Julian Anderson, visit: schott-music.com.
To learn more about Katherine Balch, visit: schott-music.com.


Julian Anderson
Nunca vi Granada (2022)
for soprano and small ensemble
5'
Commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with financial assistance from BCMG’s Sound Investment Scheme

Tombeau (2017)
for soprano and piano trio
7’
Commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with financial assistance from BCMG’s Sound Investment Scheme

Katherine Balch 
New Geometry (2015)
for ensemble
10'

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