On 7 and 8 March the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and David Sharp give the Australian premiere of Tom Coult’s Gymnopédies at the Grainger Studio. The 9 ½-minute work appears alongside works by Copland, Takemitsu, and Pärt.
Coult’s five Gymnopédies, as the title might suggest, began as works for solo piano, later arranged for a chamber orchestra of single winds, horn, harp, and a small body of strings. Coult wrote of the pieces,
The three Gymnopédies of Erik Satie are the only real examples of the form, so in writing new ones, I was free to decide which features of those three strange pieces make them ‘Gymnopédies’. Some share the distinctive surface features of Satie’s examples and some don’t. Writing something that emulated the studied simplicity of Satie’s models was a great tonic, and allowed me to get notes down quite quickly, after so much time when none were coming.
Its five movements – i. Crotchet=52, ii. With an expansive freedom, iii. Gently swaying, iv. Still, and v. Slowly dancing – are characterised by delicate, shimmering textures, with carefully calibrated moments of piquant dissonance in the harmony; they share the dreamlike mood but quiet concentration of Satie’s famous examples, with a harmonic richness and complexity that is very much Coult’s own. Their world premiere was given by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Ryan McAdams, in Manchester in 2021, at the start of Coult’s tenure as Composer-in-Association with the ensemble.
His partnership with the BBC Philharmonic has led to the creation of several striking works, several of which feature on an NMC orchestral portrait disc released in November 2024. They include Three Pieces that Disappear, a 21-minute work premiered by Nicholas Collon in 2023, which lends its title to the album. Its three movements draw on different kinds of musical and sonic disappearance or forgetting, including the enforced silence early on during the pandemic; health conditions resulting in blackouts and the sense of familiar things becoming indistinct; and a dictaphone, whose record button had been pressed at the wrong time, ‘misremembering’ sounds. The final movement features a fixed audio element based on Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (itself derived from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.7).
Coult’s violin concerto Pleasure Garden (2021), performed by Daniel Pioro and conducted by Elena Schwarz, was written as a response to the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Bridgewater in Salford, Manchester, with the RHS amongst the piece’s co-commissioners. Each of the 25-minute work’s movements takes inspiration from images and stories of variously constructed ‘natural spaces’ in and around cities: ‘Dyeing the canal blue for Queen Victoria’, ‘Francesco Landini serenades the birds’, and ‘The art of setting stones’.
After Lassus, featuring soprano Anna Dennis and conducted by Andrew Gourlay, is a 15½ -minute work that takes six duets from Orlando de Lassus’ Novae aliquot (1577) and refashions the musical material “like plasticine – reshaping, stretching and compressing them, combining them, putting them in unfamiliar surroundings, and generally getting the coloured paint out”, as Coult puts it.