Two significant works by Frank Corcoran are to be heard in France and London this summer.

The Fidelio Trio will play Corcoran’s Piano Trio at The Warehouse in the heart of London’s South Bank, on Tuesday 1 July. Dating from 1978, the Piano Trio is built around ‘macrocounterpoint; no longer note against note but layer or musical flow against layer or flow’, a reaction, says the composer, against his dislike of the sound of the classical piano trio. Three decades on, Corcoran says he retains great affection for the work’s ‘poised layers and polytemporal richness of sonorities and gestures and lines’.

On Saturday 23 August, Quasi Una Missa will be heard at the Futura Festival in Crest, France. Originally written for West German Radio in 1999, Corcoran’s third electro-acoustic composition won the 2002 Swedish E.M.S. Prize and is, he says, ‘a composition of a composer who is musically no longer innocent’. The multi-faceted work incorporates references from ‘2000 years of Irish God-utterances [to create] an Irish stew of Irish theology, a musical archaeology of 2000 years of religious tradition’.

Continuing his extended Quasi series, Corcoran has just completed Quasi Una Perla for the American double bass-and-piano duo Basso Moderno, which the composer describes as ‘Fully packed. Fun and tragedy and yell and scream and prayer and vision, the lot; needs only three minutes”.

For further details, please see our calendar.

Posted: 23 May 2008