Posted 28th August 2009

UYMP signs Philip Venables

UYMP is pleased to announce the signing of Philip Venables.

Venables is one of the most exciting composers of his generation, having been performed by the BBC Philharmonic, The BBC Singers, Ensemble 10-10, the London Sinfonietta, the Duke Quartet and the Southbank Sinfonia. His music has been performed at venues and festivals internationally, including the Wigmore Hall, Cheltenham International Music Festival, Spitalfields Festival, Bregenz Festival, the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition and the QuantumLoop Animated Film Festival.

Venables' music is often characterised by bold, colourful gestures and a direct, expressive language, often forming a juxtaposition of energetic rhythms and static textures. The Times has described his work as 'contrasting gestures, driven through by a powerful sense of drama and structure', and the Strad as 'Delicately spun melodies dissolved into bursts of aggression... gritty, soulful...'.

Venables' works include orchestral (Arc), chamber (Fight music, ANIMA, String Quartet) and vocal pieces (Thalidomide, In America et ego) and collaborative music for dance, theatre, film and community projects.

Born in 1979, Venables studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, and at the Royal Academy of Music with Philip Cashian. He is the Artistic Director of the British chamber ensemble Endymion, now celebrating its 30th anniversary.

His recent work Fight Music was performed by Endymion Ensemble as part of their 30th birthday celebrations, and will be released on NMC later this year.

His Piano Studies have just been awarded 1st prize in the International Composition Competition: From Romanticism to Contemporary, run by the National University of Music, Bucharest.

Venables is currently working on a chamber opera, Les Bâtisseurs D'Empire (The Empire Builders) with a libretto by Michael Brett. This is an adaptation of the Boris Vian play of the same name and is "a violent, surreal comment on war and colonisation".

Michael Hooper: Vian's play is 50 years old this year, written at the height of the cold war. What is it about this text that first attracted you? and why is it relevant for a contemporary audience?

Philip Venables: Yes — 50 years old, and it should be far better known than it is. It's a fantastic, absurd, funny play with lots of shocking-cum-banal violence and some brilliant one-liners. However, it caused a bit of a stir in France when it was premiered, and was subsequently taken up by quite a few student productions and the like. Although it was written at the height of the Cold War, Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire, or Le Schmürz as it is better known, was actually a harsh criticism of the French war with Algeria over Algrian independence. The play is a biting satire of 'patriarchy, nationalism and post-colonialism', as the librettist Michael Brett says. What's interesting too is the relevance to today's world. The Algerian war actually involved the first modern examples of suicide bombing, and both sides were widely accused of using torture. I'm not saying that I'm writing an overtly political opera; indeed the play isn't at all overt either, it's just an wonderful modernist absurdity. I'm just saying that, well, maybe things haven't really changed in 50 years, and the same macho ways still deserve to be satirised.

http://www.philipvenables.com/

UYMP signs Philip Venables

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