On 4 May the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Richard Tognetti gave the Australian premiere of Tom Coult’s Prelude (after Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe), a 5½ minute work for lower strings, at their annual festival at TarraWarra Museum of Art. It is a reworking of the Prelude from the E minor suite for Viol by the celebrated 17th-century composer and violist Jean de Sainte-Colombe.
Coult refracts the sparser lines of the solo viol through a dark-hued ensemble of five lower strings (2 violas, 2 cellos, and double bass). The implied harmonies are made audible, new ones added, and everything is made thicker and richer. Coult’s melodic embellishments and decorations, as well as irregular rhythmic inflections, are used to capture, he says, “some of the liquid freedom that can lift music of this period off the page”.
The Prelude was commissioned by Festival Musikdorf Ernen, supported by Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, where it premiered on 8 August 2022 as part of Coult’s residency at the Festival. Sain-Colombe’s life was dramatized by Alain Corneau in his 1991 film Tous les matins du monde.
Coult has created several reworkings and elaborations of Baroque and Renaissance repertoire, many as part of his ongoing composer-in-association role with the BBC Philharmonic. In April 2023 the orchestra premiered After Lassus with soprano Anna Dennis - a 15½ -minute work that takes six duets from Lassus’ Novae aliquot (1577) and refashions them “like plasticine – reshaping, stretching and compressing them”. For Daniel Pioro and the orchestra he also created versions of Vivaldi’s La Follia, Tartini’s Sonata No.2 in D minor, and Biber’s The Agony in the Garden from his Mystery Sonatas.