Two Cities: The buildings of London and Paris in music and film

"I call architecture frozen music" (Goethe)

     Ravel - Introduction and Allegro
     Xenakis - Concret PH
     Various - Two Cities Suites: London and Paris (world première)

The City's fabled 'square mile' contains many of London's oldest surviving buildings, and also many of its newest. So it is appropriate to the City of London Festival's ongoing theme of 'Trading Places' that this concert celebrates the twin cultural strands of architecture and music, presenting the fruits of a project that has brought them together.

In this cross-media collaboration - whose title refers to Charles Dickens' novel, set in both Paris and London - seven student composers from the Paris Conservatoire and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (with support from the Royal College of Art) have exchanged visits to their two cities. Each composer has photographed a major architectural work of his or her choice, and has created a piece of music in response. Artists followed in their footsteps creating a unique visual response to both architecture and music to accompany the works. Alongside are two other works which, in their extremely different ways, are classics of their kind.

Ravel's Introduction and Allegro for harp and chamber group is a poised and peerless masterpiece from one of Paris' golden ages of music, in the years before the first world war. Greece's Iannis Xenakis - later to be the Gresham Professor of Music - came to Paris after the Second World War, where he trained as an architect and worked as Le Corbusier's assistant, while also making his name as one of the most radically minded composers of his time. Concret PH consists of electronically transformed sounds of burning charcoal recorded onto tape; it was played as an interlude between presentations of Edgar Varèse's Poèm Electronique, in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.

Musicians:
Hyun Ae Lee violin
Ivana Cetkovic violin
Diana Gasparini cello
Colin Alexander cello
Thomas Saulet flute/piccolo
Rémi Delangle clarinet
Agnès Bérard harpsichord

Composers:
Florent Motsch-Etienne
Januibe Tejera
Jonathan Bell
Katie Butler
Mathieu Costecalde
Ophir Ilzetzki
Edmund Ferris

Film Materials:
Charlotte Heal and Mo Stoebe