News
Saxton Quartet Premiere
The world premiere of Professor Robert Saxton's String Quartet No. 3 will take place in London next week.
The world-renowned Arditti Quartet will give the first performance of Professor Saxton's latest quartet on Tuesday 10 May in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, alongside works by Birtwistle and Saariaho. Tickets are available via the South Bank Centre.
Towards the end of this month, another Saxton work will receive its premiere. On 21 May Dr Stephen Darlington will direct the first performance of Magnificat and Nunc Dimitis with the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral Oxford.
Next month the NMC label is releasing the BBC Symphony Orchestra's recording of Saxton's radio opera, The Wandering Jew, which was first broadcast last year. At over two hours long and ten years in gestation, the opera spans two thousand years of history, ranging from the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD to the Holocaust, and features the combined forces of the BBC SO, conductor Andre de Ridder, the BBC Singers, and baritone Roderick Williams as the eponymous hero.
And, at the end of next month, Saxton's 1995 work for piano and string quartet, Yardstick to the Stars, will be featured at the Cheltenham Festival as part of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Encore series. On Thursday 30 June the Festival Academy Soloists will perform the work as part of a programme of works that have been 'unjustly neglected'.