© Frances Marshall
On Friday 10 October, Colin will play-direct the world premiere of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Memoirs for Violin, Percussion and String orchestra at the Two Moors Festival, joined by violinist and Artistic Director Tamsin Waley-Cohen, and the United Strings of Europe. The piece was commissioned by the festival to celebrate their 25th anniversary, with future performances to be announced.
No stranger to Tüür’s works, Colin has previously performed the composer’s Percussion Concerto in Brno in 2015, which was broadcast on national television. Nearly a decade later, Colin and Tamsin approached Tüür to write this new work, as they felt his composing style had a deep understanding of both percussion and string instruments.
In three movements, Tüür explores how memories can mislead us while thinking about the past. The first movement “Shimmer” is about how memories are often idealised and shimmering, but details can no longer be distinguished. This is further developed in the second movement “Misty Mirrors” and leads to the third movement “Dancing Patterns” where “the spirals of memory have carried us into unfamiliar waters, where long-lost images and forgotten scents suddenly rise to the surface from the depths of oblivion”, as Tüür describes the development.
Read more about the work here.
Colin returns to the festival the following day as part of the Colin Currie Quartet, in a programme of Steve Reich and Anna Meredith.