Jill Barlow

London, Spitalfields Summer Festival: Beckett's ‘Old Earth’

Samuel Beckett, famed for his strikingly negative approach in his stage play Waiting for Godot (1953), also has a string of prose and poetry in similar vein to his credit over the years. So it was that Spitalfields Festival came to commission Alec Roth to write music to accompany a performance of Becketts ‘Old Earth’ from his prose work Fizzles written 1972–75. This received its world premiere at Spitalfields Summer Festival 2012, suitably housed in the stark dark space of The Village Underground, a disused warehouse resembling an abandoned railway tunnel in Londons East End. Trying to find my seat in the dark, when I attended the first night, 15 June 2012, shadowy figures were already chanting what turned out to be verses from James Joyces Ulysses as a fittingly mysterious, if unheralded, informal prologue. This was followed by drama directed by Jonathan Holmes, founder of Jericho House, with music by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Christophers.

London, Royal Academy of Music: Philippe Hersant

Philippe Hersant (b. 1948 in Rome, graduated Paris Conservatoire, studied with Andre Jolivet), has been working with the French national radio station France-Musique since 1973 and has received many honours as composer in France. In February 2004 Radio France presented a ‘retrospective’ of his prolific output as well as the premiere of his Violin Concerto, a Radio France commission. His new opera, Le Maine Noir , based on Anton Chekovs story, will be premiered in May 2005.