27/05/09 NEW TRACKS I've just uploaded new tracks, one from the recent Mud, Sweat and Tractors, screened on BBC4 in the Spring, and two from the upcoming Shooting the War due to transmitted, again on BBC4, in the Autumn. These should go some way to explain my recent silence.
Update: Monday 19th January "It's a while since I updated this. I've just emerged from the studio having recorded the music for an upcoming BBC4 documentary series, details of which I'll post soon. I'm starting work on my first purely instrumental concert work since the piano duet in 2007 commissioned by the extraordinary Ossian Ensemble to be premiered in March. Details below."
Joseph Atkins (b.1981) trained at Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music. Recent compositions include works for the Longfordbrown Piano Duo, the London Sinfonietta, the Royal Academy Symphony Orchestra and COMA London. Other works have been included in the Cheltenham International, Spitalfields and Bristol Community Festivals, and his work for large vocal ensemble, Mirroring the Voice, opened the British Voice Association’s Annual Conference in 2005. He is also joint composer-in-residence at Forest School in Wanstead with composer Darren Bloom.
His song cycle, It was only the Angels who Sang, set to words by poet Adam Goodyer, received its world premiere at St Martin-in-the-Fields in December 2005. His second song cycle, Notes on Love, received its first performance at St John’s, Smith Square in February 2007, and was described by acclaimed mezzo soprano, Sarah Walker as “a breath of fresh air…excellent.†The follow-up, Notes on a City, was premiered this February followed by his bawdy Jonathan Swift settings for voice, cello and piano Cry Apples
His love of the theatre has seen him work most recently at the London Palladium as Assistant Musical Director for Me and my Girl, plus the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Oxford Playhouse and at the Edinburgh Fringe. He is Musical Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon-based Year Out Drama Company who premiered his cycle of Shakespeare Sonnet settings, Time's Best Jewel at the Shakespeare Institute in June 2008 to commemorate the company's 21st anniversary.
A little info about the tracks:
...rounded with a sleep is my first work for full symphony orchestra, and here you have the final three minutes, recorded at its premiere in September 2006 at the Royal Academy of Music. Taking its inspiration from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', the work alternates between some of my most lyircal and abrasive writing..."our revels now are ended...we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little lives are rounded with a sleep."
Indian Summer is a set of variations for guitar, and is as chilled out as the title suggests. The variations stick pretty closely to the theme itself, a musical kernel that was itself indeed composed one beautiful, sunny morning in November 2005. The work is dedicated to guitarist Antonis Hatzinikolaou, who plays it here.
Answers on a Postcard is my first venture into the realms of jazz. Here it is in its performance by the Royal Academy's Composers' Band at their Spitalfields Festival gig this summer. Here an electric violin, vibraphone and accordion are added to the more usual battalion of brass, reeds and rhythm. Unusally (especially for me), there is no piano.
