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In opera, the orchestra creates the subconscious, the backstory, and the soundscape of the drama. Brooding and dark, overwhelming and passionate, or edgy and biting, the orchestra’s sound guides our imagination, and when released from its supporting role in the pit the result can be a thrilling experience of musical storytelling.
BEYOND
Thomas Adès (b.1971)
Three-Piece Suite from Powder Her Face
1. Overture
2. Waltz
3. Finale
Jonathan Dove (b.1959)
Stargazer
4. I Searching the Night Sky
5. II Constellations
6. III Arcturus & Canis chasing Ursa Major & Minor with Lyra
7. IV Gemini
8. V Orion, Pegasus
9. VI The Milky Way
Matthew Aucoin (b.1990)
Eurydice Suite
10. I The Underworld
11. II A Letter From Above
12. III A Room Made Out of String
13. IV The Walk
14. Heath
Nico Muhly (b.1981)
15. Liar Suite from Marnie
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Timothy Redmond, conductor
Peter Moore, trombone
World Premiere Recordings
Beyond words. Beyond the stage.
This is a disc inspired by opera, but without singers. Its music is a distillation of the theatrical experience heard through the voice of the orchestra. But it is more than a series of snapshots or musical postcards: each of these works serves as a concentrated introduction to the operatic language of its composer.
The recording came about initially in response to a previous album. One of the pleasures of programming a disc is deciding what to include; one of the frustrations is realising what just won’t fit on an 80 minute CD. And so it was with the 2019 Orchid Classics release The Orchestral Music of Jonathan Dove. To permit as broad a survey as possible of Dove’s orchestral works, it was necessary to omit a piece I had long admired: Stargazer, subtitled ‘an opera for trombone and orchestra’. In the intervening years, Peter Moore and I have performed the concerto many times, and we both felt the time was right to commit it to record. But what to pair it with?
2025 sees the 30th anniversary of Thomas Adès’s modern classic Powder Her Face. I remember the extraordinary excitement surrounding its premiere very well, but little could I have imagined how much of a central role the opera was going to play in my life. Since first working on it in the early 2000s, I have gone on to conduct numerous different productions – but I have also coached countless singers, pianists and other conductors on its joys and complexities. The original Dances from Powder Her Face were recorded by Paul Daniel and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, but despite having decisively entered the repertoire of orchestras worldwide, the revised Three-piece Suite was without a commercial release. An anniversary year seemed the ideal time to right that wrong.
It was while working on Adès’s second opera The Tempest at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, that I first encountered the precociously talented musical polymath, Matthew Aucoin. On an evening off from rehearsals I went to watch Matt, then the youngest ever assistant conductor at the Met, play an impeccably improvised set inspired by Schubert and Radiohead, and the extent of his abundant talents started to truly dawn on me. In the intervening years I have watched with great admiration as his career has burgeoned and flourished and seeing the premiere of Eurydice at LA Opera in early 2020 made me determined to share his exquisitely imagined music. Whilst music director of the Winston-Salem Symphony, I co-commissioned an orchestral suite of the opera together with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and after hearing Yannick give its thrilling premiere in Philadelphia, knew that this was a work that needed to be recorded.
Having spent many years working on both sides of the Atlantic and having seen dozens of new operas in the US, thanks to the tireless advocacy of organisations like Opera America and producers like Beth Morrison, I have become fascinated in discovering which composers find that their voice speaks to audiences in both Europe and the States. One such is the indefatigable Nico Muhly whose prodigious output in all genres has put him at the heart of music-making all over the world. Like its predecessor Two Boys, Marnie was a co-production between English National Opera and the Met, and the dramatic orchestral suite he draws from it stands up as its own compelling drama.
The process of researching, studying, performing and recording these works has brought me in contact with countless fascinating, knowledgeable, passionate and generous people in the music business. Whilst all the music on the disc speaks eloquently for itself, it felt a pity not to be able to share some of the words of wisdom I have learned in the process of putting it together. And so, thanks to the support of Orchid Classics, a podcast series, also entitled Beyond, will be released in conjunction with this recording. Details can be found at orchidclassics.com.
My thanks to everyone involved in the creation of this album and to the composers whose work we recorded; to Bill and Patricia O’Connor whose most generous support made it possible; to Peter Moore who creates magic whenever he plays; and to the remarkable BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra whose virtuosity knows no bounds, and whose appetite for new music is gloriously insatiable.
Timothy Redmond
Thomas Adès
Three-piece Suite from Powder Her Face (1995/2007)
Overture | Waltz | Finale
First performance: 17 June 2007, Philharmonia Orchestra, Thomas Adès, Snape Maltings, Suffolk, UK
Commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra
For many years, the Almeida Theatre in London championed new opera. Of all the numerous works it commissioned and premiered, one surely stands out amongst the rest. Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face (1995), with a libretto by Philip Hensher, is based on the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll. A society beauty, hugely wealthy and famous throughout the world, she hit the headlines in 1963 when she was divorced by her second husband, the duke. The graphic photographs that were produced in court, and the lurid tabloid stories which accompanied the trial, caused a scandal. After her divorce, the duchess lived for many years in a London hotel suite, and it is here that the opera’s first and last scenes take place, interspersed with flashbacks of events from the intervening years.
Powder Her Face achieved that rare thing in opera: global success. It has made Adès (along with Jonathan Dove) one of the most performed opera composers since Britten and this tour de force of youthful brilliance propelled its 24-year-old creator to stardom. Whilst the musical language of the opera knows no bounds, drawing inspiration from everything from tango to Der Rosenkavalier, the one restriction imposed on the composer was the number of instruments he could have in the orchestra. The Almeida has only 325 seats and so an absolute maximum of 15 instrumentalists was permitted. Adès took them at their word: the instrumentalists number 15, but the instruments they play far exceeds that. With double bass and accordion doubling fishing reels, harp doubling doorbell, clarinets playing an array of saxophones that would put a big band to shame, and an array of percussion extensive enough to require a trip to a hardware store, this is a score that’s bursting at the seams and thus ripe for symphonic adaptation. And so, it is perhaps no surprise that for the past 15 years, Adès has been gradually assembling a series of orchestral suites – each longer and more entertainingly titled than the last – in an attempt to mine the endless possibilities that the opera provides.
The Three-piece Suite (succeeded by the Hotel Suite and the Luxury Suite) is a reworking of the earlier Dances from Powder Her Face and comprises three movements. The Overture bursts forth with an exuberance and energy that overwhelms and thrills before giving way almost immediately to raunch and sleaze. Shameless clarinets slip and slide through the orchestral texture and the mocking laughter of the hotel staff can be heard.
The Waltz depicts the preparations for the Duchess’s forthcoming wedding celebrations, seen through the eyes of an envious (and incredulous) waitress. ‘Fancy’, she sings. ‘Fancy being rich. Fancy being lovely. Fancy having money to waste and not minding it.’ The effervescent waltz, at first fuelled by a seemingly endless flow of Champagne bubbles, becomes increasingly fractured (and frantic), like a staircase moving disturbingly beneath one’s feet. Solo oboe and violin collide with snarling and dismissive brass until the whole edifice begins to topple. In the opera, the maid’s incredulity becomes mixed with a barely supressed fury as she exclaims ‘Fancy purchasing a duke’. In the suite, the muted first trumpet takes her role, playing in the same super-high Queen-of-the-Night realm, until the music pirouettes from this feisty virtuosity into a figure on chuntering trombones that ushers us into the last movement.
The Finale sees a maid and electrician prepare the duchess’s room for its next inhabitant to the accompaniment of an ever-wilder and ever-more disjointed tango. The accordion, which plays such a key role in the opera, is emulated in the orchestral version with crisp flourishes from wind and brass while the strings hint at a lush opulence and the triplet rhythms of the bongos flicker in the middle distance. As the music starts to dissolve towards the end, the maid (trumpet) sternly declares ‘Enough’, to which the electrician (trombone) lewdly responds ‘Or too much!’.
Nico Muhly
LIAR (From Marnie) (2018)
First performance: 15 September 2018, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Verizon Hall, Philadephia
Commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra
Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Marnie, tells the dark tale of a young woman with a compulsion for theft and deceit. Marnie Edgar moves from town to town, constantly reinventing herself and stealing from successive employers before disappearing and repeating her subterfuge elsewhere. When eventually businessman Mark Rutland uncovers her crimes, he forces her into marriage and seeks to understand her psychological scars. As buried secrets about her traumatic childhood emerge, Marnie confronts her guilt and complex identity. A tense psychological thriller, the novel delves into themes of manipulation, redemption, and the haunting grip of the past. Little wonder perhaps that it drew the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1964 film adaptation starred Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.
Nico Muhly’s Marnie takes its narrative from the novel rather than Hitchcock’s movie. With a libretto by Nicholas Wright, the opera premiered at English National Opera in London in 2017 before making its way to the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2018. That same year, Muhly produced Liar, an orchestral suite of music from the opera. As the composer himself described it, rather than missing the voices, it is an opportunity for the orchestra to be in charge of the narrative.
Muhly’s score is strikingly atmospheric, blending a film noir-inspired soundscape with multi-layered textures that evoke Marnie’s troubled psyche. He assigns solo instruments to key figures in her life: an oboe for Marnie herself, a trombone for her domineering husband Mark, and a viola for her emotionally distant mother.
The suite opens with a wide interval leaping over restless, chattering orchestral textures, unveiling a glittering metropolis of sound. The music is by turns urgent and relentless, yearning and melancholic. At one instant a Miles Davis-inspired muted trumpet mingles with low contrabassoon, at the next furious rhythmic stabs and angular xylophone and brass threaten to overwhelm.
The moments of calm offer quiet phrases of exquisite repose. The music slows and upward-inflected string patterns (marked to be played ‘early music’ style without vibrato) provide a tender, introspective backdrop over which the oboe floats with fragile beauty. But not for long: an irrepressible energy emerges from the depths of the orchestra and we are plunged back into the maelstrom.
Jonathan Dove
Stargazer (2001)
First performance: 9 March 2007, Ian Bousfield (trombone), London Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, Barbican Centre, London, UK
Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra
In 1999, Ian Bousfield invited me to write him a trombone concerto. He felt that modern composers tended to ‘typecast’ the trombone as ‘Big Bad Wolf’ or ‘Clown’, and he was interested in a work with a more lyrical approach. I could not have written a pyrotechnic showpiece, but I was attracted to the idea of creating a miniature ‘opera’ for the trombone.
The image that started to develop in my mind was of the trombonist as a man with a telescope, a Stargazer, searching the night sky. The orchestra would represent the constellations he observed, and he would respond to what he saw.
As I was writing, the nursery melody Twinkle, twinkle, little star kept coming into my mind. I resisted at first, not least because I did not want to compete with the famous sets of variations by Mozart and Dohnányi. But the tune insisted, and eventually took over, so that the whole piece became a fantasia on it. It is never plainly stated at the speed you would expect to hear it sung, but its contour is clearly audible throughout.
Stargazer is in one continuous movement, but falls into six sections:
I. Searching the Night Sky
Stargazer asks questions of the stars: “How old are you? Can you see me? Is there something you want to tell me?” The stars continue on their way. Stargazer calls to them. At first there is no answer – then, faintly at first, the stars begin to respond.
II. Constellations
Stargazer calls out to different groups of stars (different sections of the orchestra) and they answer.
III. Arcturus & Canis chasing Ursa Major & Minor with Lyra
Chilly arctic wind, suggested by the name of the Herdsman (Arcturus, who gave his name to the Arctic) chasing both bears (Ursa Major and Minor – Polaris, the Pole Star, is in Ursa Minor). Canis, the dog, joins the chase, and Stargazer sees Lyra (which includes Vega, the harp star – this used to mark the North Pole).
IV. Gemini
Brotherly love; duality; the coexistence of the mortal and immortal sides of man. Castor and Pollux spent alternate nights in Hades and on Olympus. In Rome they stood for Life and Death.
V. Orion, Pegasus
Orion, the hunter, a giant famous for his beauty. Blinded by Oenopion (with whose daughter he was in love), he regained his sight by travelling east and gazing into the sunrise.
Pegasus, snowy white, with a mane of gold, the winged horse was the favourite of the muses as his hoof-marks caused their fountain of inspiration to start flowing.
VI. The Milky Way
Seen by many cultures as the pathway along which the dead return to their true home in the immortal stars. Each star is a departed hero or loved one.
Matthew Aucoin
Eurydice Suite (2022)
First performance: 3 February 2022,) The Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Verizon Hall, Philadelphia
Commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Winston-Salem Symphony, Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra
The Eurydice Suite is an orchestral condensation of my opera Eurydice, which is based on Sarah Ruhl’s surreal and heartbreaking play. Like the opera, the suite begins with an unsettling sound: the metallic “ping” of oblivion that announces the passage of the newly-dead through the river of forgetfulness. And like the opera, the suite toggles between the world of the living and the subterranean realm of the dead.
The suite’s first movement is a tour of the underworld: its watery percussion sounds, its “strange high-pitched noises, like a tea kettle always boiling over.” Near the end of the movement, we hear a strange sound from the contemporary world: the keening wail of a New York subway train pulling out of a station. Eurydice, newly arrived in death, hallucinates that she is alone on some unknown train platform, waiting for someone—she can’t quite remember who—to meet her.
The second movement pays a visit the world above, where Orpheus (in the guise of a solo clarinet) mourns luxuriantly. He drops a letter into the earth, hoping it will reach the underworld; and as his music fades away, we return down below, where Eurydice’s father patiently builds her a room out of string. In the third movement, the string section embodies the slow weaving of that delicate room.
The fourth movement is a phantasmagorical montage of the opera’s final act: the disastrous walk toward the world above, and the many missed connections that lead to every character being dipped once again in the river of forgetfulness.
Heath (2023)
First performance: 22 June 2023, The Met Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Carnegie Hall, New York
Commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera
The heath, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is the bare, windswept place, devoid of civilization and human comforts, where Lear, the Fool, and others end up after Lear’s eldest two daughters—to whom he has unwisely bequeathed his kingdom—have systematically stripped him of the last shreds of his authority. It is on the heath that Lear loses touch with reality, or at least with the world of unchecked privilege that he has inhabited for his whole life, and enters a state somewhere between madness and prophecy, a kind of lucid nightmare.
But the heath is more than a mere geological site; it is the psychological bedrock of the entire play. King Lear expresses a bottomlessly bleak vision of human nature, one in which laws, customs, and hierarchies—what we call “norms” in the contemporary world—are a flimsy safeguard against devouring animal appetites. When Lear lets his guard down for an instant and makes a major decision for sentimental reasons rather than according to the dictates of realpolitik, the wolves that surround him instantly show their fangs.
So, even though my orchestral piece does not directly enact the play’s heath scenes, Heath felt like the only possible title. This play’s inner landscape is a rocky, barren place, one in which every human luxury is ultimately burned away to reveal the hard stone underneath: “the thing itself,” as Lear puts it.
Heath is divided into four sections, played continuously with no break. The first and longest, “The Divided Kingdom,” embodies the atmosphere of the play’s first scenes: the uneasy sense of rituals failing to serve their purpose, of political life unravelling into chaos. The second section, “The Fool,” is full of darting, quicksilver music inspired by the Fool’s mockery of Lear. The brief third section, “I have no way…”, is inspired by the blinded Gloucester’s slow, sad progress across the landscape. And the final movement, “With a Dead March,” embodies the accumulated tragedies of the play’s final scenes.
In opera, the orchestra creates the subconscious, the backstory, and the soundscape of the drama. Brooding and dark, overwhelming and passionate, or edgy and biting, the orchestra’s sound guides our imagination, and when released from its supporting role in the pit the result can be a thrilling experience of musical storytelling.
This album celebrates the music of four of today’s most distinguished opera composers. The Three-Piece Suite from Thomas Adès’s modern classic Powder Her Face sparkles and sizzles; Nico Muhly’s Liar Suite from Marnie is a taut psychodrama in symphonic form; Matthew Aucoin distills his moving operatic version of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice into a haunting tone poem and sketches an as-yet-unwritten opera in Heath; and Jonathan Dove’s luminously beautiful Stargazer, subtitled “an opera for trombone and orchestra,” offers a lyrical showcase for its virtuosic soloist.
For this album of world-premiere recordings, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, led by contemporary music specialist Timothy Redmond, is joined by the virtuoso trombone superstar Peter Moore.
Thomas Adès
A prodigious composer, conductor and pianist, Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971. Three acclaimed operas crown a singular body of work: Powder Her Face (1995), The Tempest (2004) and The Exterminating Angel (2016) as well as the ballet Dante (2019-20). The recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Léonie Sonning Music Prize, the 2000 Grawemeyer Award (for 1997 orchestral work Asyla), and the 2023 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, Adès was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival for a decade and has conducted many of the world’s greatest orchestras, including Wiener Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2016 he became the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s inaugural Artistic Partner with whom he premiered his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Kirill Gerstein as soloist in March 2019. He performs worldwide as a pianist, and coaches annually at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.
Matthew Aucoin
Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, and writer, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. He is a co-founder of the pathbreaking American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), and was the Los Angeles Opera’s Artist in Residence from 2016 to 2020. As a composer, Aucoin is committed to expanding the possibilities of opera as a genre. His own operas, which include Eurydice and Crossing, have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Boston Lyric Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Canadian Opera Company, among others. The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Eurydice was nominated for a Grammy in 2023.
Aucoin’s most recent work of music-theater, Music for New Bodies, is a collaboration with the legendary director Peter Sellars, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham. The piece has so far been performed in Houston (co-presented by DACAMERA and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music) and at the Aspen Music Festival, and will travel to New York and Los Angeles in future seasons.
Aucoin’s orchestral and chamber music has been performed, commissioned, and recorded by such leading artists and ensembles as Yo-Yo Ma, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the pianists Conor Hanick and Kirill Gerstein, the Brentano Quartet, and singers including Anthony Roth Costanzo, Julia Bullock, Erin Morley, Davóne Tines, Danielle de Niese, Paul Appleby, and many others.
Jonathan Dove
Jonathan Dove is the most performed living opera composer in the UK. His over 30 works in this genre come in all shapes and sizes and form the backbone to his considerable oeuvre, many of which have also been performed in Europe, America and Australia. Much of his other music is palpably narrative and dramatic in conception, and covers a great range of subject matter, from contemporary to legendary, fairy-tale to sexual politics, catering to all audiences from children to adult.
Hailing from a family of architects, Dove was playing the organ in his local church at the age of twelve, and read Music at Cambridge, studying composition with Robin Holloway. Graduating from the music staff at Glyndebourne, he first gained prominence with his chamber versions of operas, including The Magic Flute, The Ring of the Nibelung, and The Cunning Little Vixen for Birmingham Opera’s touring productions, then became music advisor at the Almeida Theatre in North London, writing a plethora of theatre scores for them, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival from 2001-6.
Awarded a CBE in 2019 for services to music, he has also won the 2008 Ivor Novello Award, the 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society education award and four British Composer Awards. His 1998 Glyndebourne commission opera Flight has received 40 productions worldwide, and his television opera When She Died was seen by 2.5 million viewers.
He has written extensively in many genres, he is a prolific and popular choral composer, has numerous orchestral works to his credit, several oratorios, many song cycles and much chamber music including four string quartets.
Recent and forthcoming works include operas Marx in London (2018), Itch (2023), and forthcoming Im 80 Tagen um die Welt (Zürich, 2024) and Uprising, for Glyndebourne and Saffron Hall (2025).
Nico Muhly
Nico Muhly, born in 1981, is an American composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, music for film, choral music, chamber music and sacred music. He’s received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011), and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Tallis Scholars, King’s College and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at which he is composer in residence. He was a collaborative partner at the San Francisco Symphony and has been featured at the Barbican and the Philharmonie de Paris as composer, performer, and curator. An avid collaborator, he has worked with choreographers Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opéra Ballet, Bobbi Jene Smith at the Juilliard School, Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham at New York City Ballet; musicians Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake and Paul Simon. His work for screen includes scores for The Reader (2008) and Kill Your Darlings (2013), Howards End (2017) and Pachinko (2022, 2024). Recordings of his works have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008).
Timothy Redmond
Conductor
Timothy Redmond is a conductor, presenter, writer and educator. His career encompasses an exceptionally broad range of musical interests, and he has achieved notable recognition for his work in opera, contemporary music and education.
A frequent guest conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester Camerata and Fondazione Haydn, he has conducted widely throughout Europe and North America, has held music director positions in the UK and the US and has recorded discs for EMI, Warner Classics and Harmonia Mundi as well as Orchid Classics. He has conducted over 100 productions for opera companies in London, New York, St Louis and St Petersburg and at festivals in Aldeburgh, Bregenz, Los Angeles and Venice.
Widely known as a champion of the music of Thomas Adès, he holds the distinction of having conducted Powder Her Face more than anyone else, with productions for companies including the Bolzano Festival, English National Opera, Irish National Opera, Mariiinsky Theatre and the Royal Opera. Having assisted on the premiere of The Tempest at Covent Garden, and on subsequent productions at the Wiener Staatsoper, Strasbourg and the Met, he was invited to edit the published score of the opera for Faber Music.
In addition to his work on the podium, Tim’s experience as an educator is considerable and has won him acclaim internationally. As Professor of Conducting at the Guildhall School, visiting tutor at the Royal Academy of Music and course leader at the European Orchestral Performing Institute, he has mentored countless aspiring professional musicians. As a writer and composer he has devised shows for young audiences all over the world. Recent and future highlights include Musical Mechanics and Just One More Story for the LSO, Symphony in the Snow for the Gävle Symphony and Count Me In! with Alexandra Dariescu for the Leeds International Piano Competition and the Lang Lang Foundation. He is co-creator of the Royal Albert Hall’s My Great Orchestral Adventure™ concert series, co-founder of And Other Duties international conducting courses and in his spare time makes musical settings of Lynley Dodd’s classic Hairy Maclary children’s books, which have been performed widely.
Peter Moore
Trombone
Peter Moore, a world-renowned trombonist, gained international attention at age 12 when he became the youngest winner of BBC Young Musician in 2008. Born in Belfast and raised in Greater Manchester, his early involvement in the Brass Band culture in Northern England was crucial to his rapid development.
Moore has performed concertos with leading orchestras including the BBC Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and given recitals at venues including Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, London’s Wigmore Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein. He has collaborated with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Vasily Petrenko and John Wilson.
From 2015 to 2017, he was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist.
His repertoire spans from early Baroque to contemporary works. A great proponent of new music, Moore has premiered works by Francisco Coll, Roxanna Panufnik, and Dani Howard. He gave the UK premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s Trombone Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and the European premiere of Joe Chindamo’s “Ligeia” with the National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin.
Moore’s debut album, “Life Force,” was released in 2018, earning critical acclaim and he is due to release an album with Chandos Records and the award-winning Tredegar Brass Band in 2025.
Formerly the Principal Trombone of the London Symphony Orchestra, Moore departed after 10 years to focus on his solo career. He is currently a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and has given masterclasses globally, including at the Juilliard School and Paris Conservatoire. Peter Moore is a Getzen International Artist, performing on the Getzen 4147IB.
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
As Scotland’s national broadcasting orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has been performing for audiences across Scotland, the UK and internationally since 1935. From Oban to Aldeburgh and London to Seoul (as part of BBC Proms Korea), 2024 is no exception. The orchestra’s live performances are regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Radio Scotland and Sounds, as well as BBC Television and iPlayer.
Opening eyes and ears with ambitious repertoire beyond any benchmark, the BBC SSO is Scotland’s leading champion of new music. Across nine decades, it has commissioned orchestral music by the most original voices of its time and hosts its annual Tectonics Festival of new and experimental music each spring alongside its Creative Partner Ilan Volkov.
With Associate Artist Lucy Drever the orchestra runs projects that inspire creativity and connection with families, schools and communities across Scotland. And through a close association with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the orchestra mentors the next generation of conductors, composers and instrumentalists. In 2024, the orchestra supported young musical talent in BBC Radio Scotland’s inaugural Young Classical Musician of the Year competition.
Ryan Wigglesworth began his tenure as Chief Conductor in September 2022. One of the foremost composer-conductors of his generation, he has directed a wide range of repertoire with the BBC SSO including the ballets of Stravinsky, major works of Elgar, and UK premieres by György Kurtág and Composer-in-Association Hans Abrahamsen. Regularly performing at the BBC Proms and Edinburgh International Festival, the orchestra is a recipient of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and four Gramophone Awards.
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