Sunday 29 June 2025, 7.30pm
Plus-Minus presents a programme for clarinet and keyboard, featuring two landmark works alongside three premieres. The show includes Peter Maxwell Davies’s starkly devastating Hymnos and Paul Saunders’s jazz-inflected reinterpretation of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo. Alex Paxton has arranged Justgum Friend’ from his new album Delicious, and Francesca Fargion a new version of her All the Other Songs. The show is completed with the premiere of The Mad Moon and the Owls by Philadelphia based composer Natacha Diels.
Newton Armstrong presents a new solo electronics work made of interacting ensembles of microtonal synthesisers projected into loudspeakers distributed throughout the room.
PROGRAMME:
- Peter Maxwell Davies “Hymnos”
- Igor Stravinsky, arr. Paul Saunders “Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo”
- Francesca Fargion “All the Other Songs”
- Newton Armstrong New Work
- Alex Paxton “Justgum Friends”
- Natacha Diels “The Mad Moon and the Owls”
Plus-Minus Ensemble
Vicky Wright, clarinets
Roderick Chadwick, piano/keyboards
Newton Armstrong, electronics
Newton Armstrong is a composer, electronics performer, and occasional builder of electronic musical instruments. His work focuses on forms of music that emerge in the composed interactions between people, technologies, and their environments. Recent projects include The Book of the Sediments with soprano Juliet Fraser, and the on-going solo electronics series fuck everything.
Francesca is a composer/performer currently doing a PhD at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, funded by Midlands4Cities. She studied the piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before doing a Masters in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths University. She works with song-writing, surreal naivety and humour often. In addition to her solo work, she writes for her sibling duo collaboration, The Fargions, who have also recently begun curating an experimental performance event series, 'Good Company’, in London. She has performed and collaborated with ensembles such as Apartment House and Plus Minus ensemble, in addition to working with several dance and theatre practitioners. This includes working extensively with Burrows&Fargion on their project '52 Portraits', and their ongoing series Music For Lectures.
Alex, ”highly innovative...of exceptional creative imagination and musical energy, packed with life force unlike anything else” (BBC Magazine/Ivor Novello British Composer Awards) is an award-winning composer & jazz-trombonist. His scores are published by Ricordi (Berlin).
He has been described as “A Magician of Sound...hyperkinetic rainbow-hued...joy & freedom” (Financial Times), “the most joyous sound I’ve heard in ages!” (New York Times), "A riotous overabundance of love and rage...an extraordinary experience” (The Wire),”a system-crasher of genre...unmistakable style...highly complex, sophisticated and extremely entertaining, virtuoso ad absurdum" (Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik), and “a super nova...a brazen sensorial mash up...riot and a rainbow...brimmingly heartfelt multi sensorial, genuinely energising fizzer of a new work...super charged joy...forces us all to sit up and loosen up and buck up” (Kate Mollison BBC New Music Show.)
Natacha Diels is a Philadelphia-based composer and performer whose work blends choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to construct worlds that are at once wondrous and unsettling. https://natachadiels.com/
