Charlotte BrayWed 4 December brought the Ivors Composer Awards and lots to celebrate for Composers Edition at the British Museum hosted ceremony. Formally known as the BASCA Composer Awards, it’s a highlight in the UK, showcasing the very best in composition today.
Mark Bowden
Composers Edition’s cohort were well represented with two composers making the final cut. Charlotte Bray’s Invisible Cities for Viola and Piano won the Solo or Duo category. It is inspired by Italo Calvino’s book of the same title, not least in the relationships between the musical ideas which exist alongside and are sometimes even influenced by one another, but are – for the most part – invisible entities, inhibiting separate worlds. Invisible Cities was commissioned by the Verbier Festival and premiered in the UK by Barbara Buntock and Huw Watkins at the Purcell Room, London
Mark Bowden’s Sapiens nominated in the Chamber Ensemble category was similarly inspired by literature, but of a rather different kind. Commissioned for and premiered by solo soprano saxophonist Simon Harem and the London Sinfonietta, it took its inspiration from Yuval Noah Harari’s exploration of the basis of the ‘anthropocene’ (age of man) of the same title.
Finally, there was a recognition of the work of Erika Fox as she received the Lifetime Achievement Award, presented in association with the Music Publishers Association. Erika Fox’s music has enjoyed a renaissance of attention in the past year due in no small part to the outstanding success of the Goldfield Ensemble’s portrait CD.
Composers Edition is very proud to be working with all these wonderful and rightly celebrated composers and look forward to another successful year in 2020.
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Tags: Barbara Buntock, Charlotte Bray, Erika Fox, Goldfield Ensemble, Huw Watkins, Invisible Cities, Ivors Composer Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award, Mark Bowden, Sapiens, Verbier Festival
