The Centre Is Everywhere: Liverpool

Programme
Ligeti Métamorphosen nocturnesVivaldi Four SeasonsFinnis The Centre is Everywhere (Touring Premiere)Strauss Metamorphosen
Creative Team
Edmund Finnis ComposerRakhi Singh Solo ViolinManchester Collective String Orchestra

About The Show
His music is a breath on the wind.His music is light dancing on water.His music is a lover’s whisper in the dead of night.It is both beautiful and strange.
This season, we’re very proud to be touring a new work by Edmund Finnis. It’s called The Centre is Everywhere, and we gave the first ever performance of it this summer, at the Southbank Centre in London. Now, we’re bringing this mysterious and beautiful object on tour, to be performed in seven cities by the full Manchester Collective lineup - eleven solo string players.
Alongside Edmund’s “iridescent and compelling” music (The Guardian), the show also features an unholy mashup of Ligeti’s Métamorphosen Nocturnes and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, performed by our very own Rakhi Singh. We close the show with Richard Strauss’ devastating Metamorphosen - a piece of music written by an old, dying man during the last months of the Second World War. The piece is an elegy for Europe.
Metamorphosen is a piece we’ve wanted to play for a long time - it’s a real “Mount Everest” for string players - and we can’t wait to share it with you in this, our largest and most ambitious programme to date.
Our commission of The Centre is Everywhere by Edmund Finnis is kindly supported by the PRSF Foundation’s New Music Biennial.

Manchester Collective
Manchester Collective are changing the way people experience live music. Since their first set of “powerful, moving, & extraordinary” shows in 2017 (Yorkshire Post), the work of the Collective has expanded at breakneck speed. They now play in concert halls, warehouses, and factory spaces in 18 cities across Europe and the UK, performing a combination of cutting edge new music, classical masterpieces, and staged theatrical work to a hungry, new audience.
Recent performing highlights include international concert debuts in Holland, Switzerland, and Northern Ireland; appearances at the Southbank Centre in London to perform The Centre is Everywhere, a major new commission by Edmund Finnis; and a critically acclaimed tour of Pierrot Lunaire, a staged production of Arnold Schoenberg’s masterpiece featuring a newly commissioned English libretto by David Pountney, and presented by BBC 6 Music’s Elizabeth Alker.
New music has always been of vital importance to the Collective - in 2019/20 they premiere major new works by Paul Clark, Erland Cooper, and Alex Groves. The current season will also see the Collective mount their largest ever international tour - a revival of 2018’s critically acclaimed Sirocco, featuring South African cellist Abel Selaocoe.
Manchester Collective’s work has been featured by the BBC on an ongoing basis, most recently in the form of a one hour “supercut” of exceptional live performances from around the UK, broadcast on Radio 3. Other recordings have appeared on Classic FM, NTS Radio, Melodic Distraction, and on Tender Symmetry, released on the Erased Tapes label in 2018.