St Mary’s Church, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5EB. Doors open 5.45pm. Bar.
Introduction by artist Caroline Burraway and members of the quartet of Charlotte Bray's composition ‘Ungrievable Lives’.
“An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.”
Composer Charlotte Bray’s string quartet took its inspiration from the emotive installation of the same name, created by artist Caroline Burraway and on view in Hay Castle during the Festival.
Tickets: included in concert ticket
Award-winning British contemporary artist Caroline Burraway studied BA (Hons) Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts and MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in the UK and internationally and has been nominated and won several awards including First Prize of the prestigious TBW Drawing Prize (formerly Jerwood) 2018. Her work has featured in art journals and magazines, including The Times and The Guardian, and is held in museums and private collections.
Burraway’s body of work confronts socio-political conflicts and cultural ruptures between and within communities, engaging the viewer in conversation around these issues. Concerned with underlying social structures and the everyday lived experience of the displaced and disenfranchised, she explores the interplay between the banality of the everyday and the political conditions of their precarious existence.
Burraway has been responding to the refugee crisis since 2015, filming and collecting research materials in refugee camps across Europe which she uses for installations, video, soundscape and drawings. This project, supported by UNHCR, seeks to raise awareness and to provoke a humanitarian response to the twin issues of displacement and dispossession, while questioning the differential values placed on a Western life and the life of the refugee arriving at the borders of Europe.
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British-German composer Charlotte Bray is an esteemed and in-demand composer, exhibiting uninhibited ambition and desire to communicate. Her music is exhilarating, inherently vivid and richly expressive with lyrical intensity. An Ivor Novello Award winner (2019), she uses her voice to spotlight global issues, including the refugee crisis, unification, terrorism, and humanity’s impact on nature.
Bray’s music has been performed and commissioned by institutions such as BBC Symphony and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Aurora Orchestra and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Her work has featured at festivals in Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Tanglewood, Aix-en-Provence, Verbier and Kuhmo, as well as with renowned conductors including Marin Alsop, Sir Mark Elder, Sakari Oramo, Oliver Knussen, Jessica Cottis, Daniel Harding, Duncan Ward, and Karina Canellakis.
Bray has held a number of Composer-in-Residence positions, most recently at Kuhmo International Chamber Music Festival 2023 and Spannungen Festival 2023. Other residencies include Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival (2015), MacDowell (2013, 2015), Aldeburgh Music (2010, 2015), Liguria Study Centre Bogliasco (2013), Oxford Lieder Festival (2011) and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Sound and Music (2009-10). She is currently the Composer-in-Residence with L’Orchestre de Chambre de Genève, which is a 3-year position for the 2023/24 - 2025/26 seasons.
Originally from High Wycombe, Bray (b.1982) graduated from Birmingham Conservatoire with First Class Honours, having studied composition with Joe Cutler; she was later named as their 2014 Alumni of the Year. She then completed a Master’s in Composition with Distinction from the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Mark-Anthony Turnage. Winner of the Lili Boulanger Prize (2014), Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent (2014) and Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize (2010), Bray went on to participate in the Britten-Pears Contemporary Composition Course and studied at Tanglewood Music Centre. She lives in Berlin.