Rambert Orchestra
by Rambert Dance Company's Music Director, Paul Hoskins.
2010-11 is the third consecutive season in which our signature piece has been a significant music commission. This has ensured that a new piece of music has been heard live at every Rambert performance, and even more importantly that our work has been extended and broadened by close association with composers. Howard Goodall, Julian Anderson and Tobias Picker have all been great influences on our work, and they demonstrate a range of styles that perhaps only Rambert would succeed in presenting.
The rest of our repertoire is currently as varied as ever. Tim Rushton's new Monolith has already drawn a lot of audience comment about the music, Peteris Vasks' beautiful Piano Quartet. Our percussionists continue to wow audiences with their versatility in A Linha Curva, and Ben Pope's Cardoon Club brings us some 70s lighter music, complete with guitars, hammond organ, drums and orchestra. Siobhan Davies' The Art of Touch continues to sparkle with virtuosic Harpsichord Sonatas by Scarlatti.
Our dancers have also become more ambitious in their choice of musical collaborations for our choreographic programme, and the programme at the Linbury Studio Theatre in December 2010 showed how the Company's smaller-scale work also benefits from a wide range of music; in this case by a string quartet by Aleksandra Vrebalov, an African drumming piece by Rambert percussionist Robert Millett, new pieces from Gavin Higgins, and Guy Conelly.
I am very excited by our plans for the next three years. Rambert Orchestra is looking forward to Wagner's Siegfried Idyll when we revive Paul Taylor's classic ballet Roses in May 2011. It has long been a dream of mine to find a way of reworking Ravel's music from l'enfant et les sortilèges, and Stephen McNeff has taken on the challenge for Mark Baldwin's new ballet Seven for Secret, which opens in September; I am currently researching Alex North's music for A Streetcar Named Desire, as Javier de Frutos begins to think about a new ballet marking the centenary of Tennessee Williams. In 2012 we will mark another significant centenary with a revival of Rambert's version of Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, with Gavin Higgins commissioned to write a contemporary response to partner Debussy's ground-breaking score.
