Matthew Hindson has been announced as composer-in-focus at the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra for the 24/25 season, deepening his burgeoning artistic partnership with the ensemble, which will see several European and national premieres.
On 25 October Valentino Worlitzsch (principal cello of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchester) joins Nicholas Milton and the orchestra for the European premiere of In Memoriam: Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra (2000). The 30-minute work is cast in two contrasting movements - “Lament” and “Celebration” – and is dedicated to two of Hindson’s late cousins - Margaret Davis and Robert Hopkins; Hindson honours the latter’s Aboriginal heritage with the inclusion of musical figures from that culture.
The use of amplification in the work heightens the range of tone colours available, as well as broadening the dynamic range, underlining both moments of expressive intensity and quiet reflection. “In this piece I have strived to explore many of the universal feelings experienced upon the death of a loved one”, Hindson writes, “Thus there are moments of anger, sadness, grief, resignation and so on. The work does not aim to be morbid…The second movement in particular aims to celebrate joyous memories of life”.
The season-long focus closes with the German premiere of Maralinga for violin and string orchestra on 4 April, with Tassilo Probst as soloist conducted by Nicolò Umberto Foron, as part of a programme focusing on war. The 11-minute work, both visceral and elegiacally lyrical by turns, takes its title from the site of secret nuclear tests conducted by the British government in the 1950s and 1960s, in which Australian military personnel and the Aboriginal population were used as unwitting guinea pigs, with terrible consequences. Previous champions of the work include Lara St John (for whom it was written), and Amalia Hall (who recorded it for BIS Records with the United Strings of Europe).
The Göttingen orchestra will also return to works by Hindson they have previously championed. On 14 and 16 February the orchestra share the concert platform with the Gauss Quartet in The Rave and the Nightingale. The 2021 work sees the collision of Franz Schubert’s musical imagination with the frenetic dance music culture of the 1990s, filtering his late G Major quartet through a contemporary idiom – a hallmark of Hindson’s style, whose orchestral music frequently draws on the energies of pop, rock, and electronica. The orchestra previously performed The Rave and the Nightingale with the Gauss Quartet in 2022, and in 2020 with the GSO Streichquarttet.
On 28 March Meret Louisa Vogel joins Nicholas Milton and the orchestra for flute concerto House Music, whose German premiere they gave in January 2023. The title of the work, cast in four movements, gestures to both irrepressible energies of the House genre and the journey through the many familiar domestic spaces the 25-minute piece undertakes. On 29 November they perform Boom-Box¸ a 4-minute fanfare for orchestra that especially showcases its percussion section, a piece they have performed as recently as February 2024 and in the 2022/23 season.
Hindson’s chamber music will also appear early in the season, with the European premiere on 22 and 23 September of 12345678 for violin and double bass with Marine Koyama and Takanari Koyama from the orchestra.