Gaza Cantos @ Hexham Abbey Festival

Hexham Abbey Festival of Music & Arts LogoFantastic vi­olist Emma Richards will be per­forming my short piece Gaza Cantos at a lunch­time con­cert on Thursday 30 September as part of Hexham Abbey Festival of Music & Arts. The pro­gramme also in­cludes Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder, Johannes Brahms’s F minor Sonata and move­ments from a tran­scrip­tion of the first Bach cello suite.

Listings: Facebook / Venue

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Hear: La leggerezza delle città

La leggerezza delle città, which was premièred two weeks ago at Encuentros Cuenca, is now avail­able over on Bandcamp for streaming and down­load. Below is a photo from be­fore the con­cert in Cuenca in the cloister of art gal­lery and ex-convent, the Fundación Antonio Pérez. The view was spec­tac­ular and as the sounds of the tape music seemed to creep in from the narrow streets and burst from the valley below the ex­per­i­ence of the music was very vivid.

Concert space at Encuentros Cuenca: the cloister of Fundación Antonio Pérez

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Quiet Games & Improvisation

Poster for A Curious NightI will be performing/appearing/being at A Curious Night at the Nip & Tipple in Whalley Range the evening of Monday 13th September. Put to­gether by com­poser Nina Whiteman and per­form­ance artist Michael Mayhew, it will in­clude an ec­lectic range of per­form­ances, hap­pen­ings and a ‘curious ve­get­able com­pet­i­tion’, spurred on by Nabokov’s sug­ges­tion that ‘curi­osity is in­sub­or­din­a­tion in its purest form’. My con­tri­bu­tions will in­clude an audi­ence im­pro­visa­tion piece with elec­tronic at­mo­sphere, titled Quiet Games, and an im­pro­vised per­form­ance on the cello. Come along, it should be intriguing.

Listings: Facebook / MySpace / Venue

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Encuentros Cuenca

Encuentros Cuenca poster on billboard in Cuenca.

I have ar­rived home from a won­derful trip to premiere my tape piece La leggerezza delle città at Encuentros Cuenca. The fest­ival was fant­astic, the dance in par­tic­ular standing out, and the cloister of the Fundación Antonio Pérez with a view across the valley proved a beau­tiful set­ting for the con­cert of elec­troacoustic music, which also in­cluded music by Donal Sarsfield, Panos Amelides, Irma Catalina Álvarez and Ricardo Climent. Many thanks to all the Encuentros Cuenca team. It was great to meet them all!

I was snapped dif­fusing during the con­cert by the local news­paper, El Día:

El Día, Cuenca, 05.09.2010, p. 16

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Tape Pieces @ Encuentros Cuenca

Encuentros Cuenca PosterTwo of my tape pieces Para cruzar el sueño and the brand-new La leggerezza delle città will be per­formed on the 4th of September at the Encuentros Cuenca fest­ival in Spain. I’m very grateful to Irma Catalina Álvarez and the rest of the fest­ival or­gan­isers for com­mis­sioning La leggerezza delle città and flying me over to see the mar­vel­lous fest­ival for my­self. I can’t wait. Fellow ad­optive Mancunians, Panos Amelides and Donal Sarsfield, are also having works premiered at Encuentros and University of Manchester lec­turer Ricardo Climent fea­tures in the con­cert of elec­troacoustic music as well. The fest­ival also in­cludes per­form­ances of ex­per­i­mental dance and theatre, with all the events taking place at the Fundación Antonio Pérez, a gal­lery of con­tem­porary art.

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  • Microbiography

    Chris Swithinbank is a British-Dutch com­poser who works with both acoustic in­stru­ments and elec­tronic sounds. He is cur­rently a stu­dent at Harvard University with Chaya Czernowin.
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