Sunday 30 August 2015, 8pm
Intricate and compelling improvised trio performance from Newcastle-based harpist Rhodri Davies, Norwegian double bassist Michael Duch and great pianist John Tilbury.
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
Michael Francis Duch (Trondheim, 1978) is a Norwegian bass player and Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He has been involved in more than 50 recordings released in various formats, including two solo albums, and has played concerts in Europe, Asia and North America.
Michael Francis Duch plays in a trio with Rhodri Davies and John Tilbury, the rockband Dog & Sky, the improvquartet LEMUR with Bjørnar Habbestad, Hild Sofie Tafjord and Lene Grenager and various other constellations. Ad Hoc collaborations include Pauline Oliveros, Mats Gustafsson, Christian Wolff, Tony Conrad, Joëlle Léandre, amongst others.
He completed his project “Free Improvisation – Method and Genre: Artistic Research in Free Improvisation and Improvisation in Experimental Music” as a research-fellow at NTNU late October 2010.
