London Sinfonietta to premiere alumnus Laurence Osborn's work 'Mute'

The latest work by composer Laurence Osborn (Hertford College, 2008), Mute, will be premiered on Thursday 3 April at the Southbank Centre in a performance by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson.

Laurence has described Mute as a series of twelve miniature ‘anti-concertos’: rather than having an ostentatious solo, each of the twelve players has a solo part that is muted, muffled, distorted, or drowned out. The fascinating range of cultural references which have inspired the composition include: elocution, ventriloquism and dubbing in My Fair Lady; the drowned-out voices of different mermaids from Hans Christian Anderson and Rene Magritte; the crackly voice, recorded in 1860, of phonograph inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville; and an interview with electronic musician Burial from Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life about the influences of the ghost stories of MR James.  

Details of Laurence’s other works are available on the Rayfield Allied Publishing website, including the his most recent works TOMB! (which won both the 2024 RPS and Ivor awards for Best Chamber-Scale Composition) and Schiller’s Piano.