Articles about Auricle
From Miles Davies and Mahler to an ensemble affair
Michael Tumelty, The Herald, 6th Feb 2010
I want to draw attention to yet another group on the Scottish music scene, the Auricle Ensemble. They're not brand new. The group was founded in 2007 by musicians Christopher Swaffer (who studied composition with John Casken and conducting with Garry Walker in Manchester) and Fifer Kenneth Letham, a brass band man from the same neck of the woods as John Wallace.
The team has already established a relationship for the Auricle Ensemble with Michael Dale's West End Festival, where you will hear them again this year. To date they have given 15 concerts around the UK, with a repertoire ranging from Rhapsody In Blue to Miles Davis's Birth Of The Cool Suite, and Pierrot Lunaire. I have a feeling this year the Auricle Ensemble might move closer to the beating heart of music in Glasgow. There's something in their programming which suggests a group on the move.
This year they take up a residency at St Bride's Church in the west end of Glasgow. Among other projects they will tackle is a concert version of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera and a number of Peter Maxwell Davies's music theatre works, including Eight Songs For A Mad King (a shattering piece of music theatre) and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot.
Crucially, The Auricle Ensemble's residency at St Bride's will feature a two-year mini-Mahler project, in which the group win perform the reduced versions Mahler's works made for Arnold Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performance in Vienna. (Regular readers might recall me raving about that phenomenon as we glimpsed it in last year's Edinburgh International Festival.)
That begins tonight in a series entitled St Bride's At Seven. The concert will feature a performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, reduced for an ensemble of 14 players and soprano. It is new and fully authorised by Mahler's publisher, Universal Edition. It should be an alluring and enthralling experience.
For those Mahlerians (like me) who cannot be there, worry not. I think it probably hasn't been announced yet, I understand this new mini-version of Mahler Four (in which the symphony is complete) will return in mid to late June in the context of the West End Festival. Before that, the Auricle Ensemble’s next appearance with their mini-Mahler project will be on May 1 when they play Mahler’s Songs Of A Travelling Wayfarer in Schoenberg’s arrangement. As ever, watch this space.
Abridged from the Arts Section, The Herald, Saturday 06/02/2010.
Scan of the full article here