Harvey: Bird Concerto With Pianosong

Catalogue # NMCD177

Jonathan Harvey won a Gramophone Award in 2008 for his NMC CD Body Mandala. The works, commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, explore his fascination with Eastern philosophies.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra celebrates the life and work of Jonathan Harvey in two days of concerts, films and talks at the Barbican, London. Total Immersion runs from the 28-29 January 2012.

Harvey’s Bhakti was the first release on NMC in 1989.

Jonathan was invited by Pierre Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s.

Bird Concerto - Harvey's hommage to Messiaen - is a celebration of the kind of technical advances in electroacoustics which the creator of Oiseaux exotiques and the Catalogue d’oiseaux was never able to explore. Harvey started writing the piece when he was in California and says that ‘indigo bunting, orchard oriole, golden crowned sparrow ... are some of the forty colourful Californian birds whose songs and cries sparked the ignition of this work’. The bird sounds have been innovatively transformed to create a mesmeric dialogue between nature and art. Harvey sets the piano soloist (the work was commissioned by pianist Joanna MacGregor) the challenge of combining piano playing and triggering a sampler/ synthesizer so that the live electronics can be realised in real-time performance. Other works on this disc are Other Presences, for trumpet and multi-loop effects, and two versions of the canonic Ricercare una melodia (1984) originally written for trumpet and quadraphonic tape-delay system, but here performed on oboe and cello, with live electronics from Sound Intermedia.

Harvey, J:
Bird Concerto with Pianosong
Ricercare una melodia for oboe
Other Presences
Ricercare una melodia for cello

(All live recordings from the BBC)