Vale of Glamorgan Festival

Steph Power - and / ante
Michael Parkin - Monsieur Croche’s Fugue
Maja Palser - a cry
Mark Bowden - Five Memos

David Adams violin
Alice Neary cello
Robin Green piano

The International Society of Contemporary Music’s World Music Days are a bit like Eurovision, but for composers.

Each year a selection of new Welsh music is selected for the global competition, and you can hear some of the finest examples from recent editions as the composers introduce their own music in this showcase.

Steph Power’s and/ante, written for violin, cello and piano, is a response to the global movement of refugees in recent years. The title is a play on both the name of the poet Dante, and the musical instruction ‘andante’, meaning ‘walking pace’. Maja Palser’s solo piano piece a cry also addresses the refugee crisis, with a lullaby-like quality and sense of grief and loss.

Michael Parkin’s Monsieur Croche’s Fugue emerged from an unusual brief – to write a short, solo piano piece starting with a few bars of Debussy. He took inspiration from Monsieur Croche, Debussy’s alter-ego in a collection of his writings published posthumously in 1921.

Mark Bowden is a great admirer of the Italian journalist and novelist Italo Calvino. So much so that Five Memos is his tribute to artistic virtues – Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity – Calvino planned to articulate in a series of lectures before he died in 1985. The composition for violin and piano premiered in 2015 and was originally commissioned to be played by this year’s Festival featured composer, Huw Watkins.

Presented in partnership with Tŷ Cerdd.