The Castle, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5DG. Doors open 1.00pm. N.B. Please arrive before 1.30pm for the included performance by Zanyar Hesami starting at 1.30pm.
How exile and enforced emigration has impacted on musicians and composers. With Peter Florence and guests Caroline Burraway, Stephen Johnson and Charlotte Bray.
Tickets: tba
Writer, composer, broadcaster and arranger Stephen Johnson presented Radio 3’s Discovering Music for 14 years, as well as a series of 14 programmes about the symphonies of Bruckner. He is also a regular contributor to the BBC Music Magazine. He is the author of Bruckner Remembered (Faber 1998), and studies of Mahler and Wagner (Naxos 2006, 2007). His book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (Notting Hill Editions, 2018) won a Rubery Book Award in 2021. It was followed in 2020 by a book about Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 (Faber). Stephen’s orchestral work Behemoth Dances had its premiere in Moscow in April 2016, and its UK premiere in in May. In January - February 2019 his Clarinet Quintet Angel’s Arc was performed by Emma Johnson and the Carducci Quartet, with further performances at Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, New York and Australia. His ghost story-inspired Quintet Unquiet Sleepers had its premiere at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in 2024.
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.
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.