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World Premieres of Gavin Bryars's 11th Floor with the Cullberg Ballet and Peer Gynt with Tanztheater Bielefeld

Oct. 14, 2014

World Premieres of Gavin Bryars's <em>11th Floor</em> with the Cullberg Ballet and <em>Peer Gynt</em> with Tanztheater Bielefeld

Gavin Bryars sees the premieres of two new works for ballet this month: Peer Gynt, scored for full orchestra, and 11th Floor, scored for saxophone, piano, accordion, and double bass.

11th Floor received its premiere on October 10 in Umeå, Sweden, with further performances scheduled through November 19. Commissioned by Cullberg Ballet, the work is Bryars’s fourth collaboration with Canadian choreographer Édouard Lock. Of the work, Bryars writes:

For the three previous works [with Lock], I’ve expanded fragments of existing music, sometimes extremely small ones, into longer works that together make a sequence of dances. The first, 2, was for amplified harpsichords based on Frescobaldi; the second, Amjad, took iconic moments from Tchaikovsky; and the third, Dido and Orfeo, reworks fragments from operas by Purcell and Gluck. With the new ballet however, the musical references are to a genre rather than a particular composer: ‘film noir’ from the 1940’s and 50’s.

On October 19, the Bielefeld Theatre in Germany opens a production of Bryars’s Peer Gynt, a ballet based on the musical sequence and narrative of Edvard Grieg’s incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same name. The production features choreography by Gregor Zöllig and costume design by Hank Irwin Kittel, with Elisa Gogou leading the Bielefeld Philharmonic Orchestra. Bryars comments:

As with several of my ballet scores, notably those for Édouard Lock, I’ve been asked to model the music for this ballet on Grieg’s score while at the same time creating original music, which, although it alludes to the older music, for stylistic and historical reasons, Grieg could not have written.

Performances of Peer Gynt take place through February 1, 2015 at the Theater Bielefeld.

For more information on the performances, please visit Cullberg Ballet and Theater Bielefeld.

Details on Gavin Bryars can be found at schott-music.com.

Gavin Bryars
Peer Gynt (2014)
ballet music based on Grieg's Peer Gynt
for orchestra
100’

11th Floor (2014)
for ensemble
sax-pno.acc-db
40’

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