On Wednesday 3 July 2024 we headed to the Dutch Church in Austin Friars, London to celebrate 35 years of NMC Recordings! It was a brilliant evening of new music from new and established composers championed by NMC over the years.
It is impossible to encapsulate all that we do in a 90-minute concert but as a brief snapshot of the incredible artists and composers we have the pleasure to work with, the evening was perfect. It was also wonderful to be able to celebrate our birthday with so many faces both new and familiar.
"NMC deserves accolades for all it has done and all it continues to do, and this concert, sandwiching the older generation of voices between two bursts of young composers, was the perfect summary of its mission."
First the National Youth Choir Fellowship Ensemble performed two pieces by previous NYC Young Composers, Ben Nobuto's Sol (winner of the 2023 Ivor Novello Classical Award for Best Choral Composition) and Millicent B James' Finding Your Home. Both these works are available on NMC (Young Composers: Volumes 4 and 5). These were sung alongside Imogen Holst's beautiful A Hymne to Christ and Roxanna Panufnik's O Hearken.
Ben Nobuto’s mercurial Sol, recorded but never performed live before, explored a full range of buzzing lips, elaborate hocketing, overtones and whistling, and even spoken arguments among the choir
The brilliant Zoë Martlew hosted the evening and also performed G-Lude, her own composition for cello. Launched in 2012, Debut Discs is our flagship talent development scheme, giving composers a first full-length album. They act as musical calling cards for these talented composers, enabling promoters, commissioners and audiences to hear their work. G-Lude will feature on Zoë Martlew’s 2025 Debut Disc.
Roderick Williams and Andrew West followed, performing an eclectic range of pieces for piano and voice by Brian Elias, Robert Saxton, Howard Skempton, Roderick Williams himself, and a selection of songs from Richard Rodney Bennett's Songs Before Sleep; Judith Weir's The Voice of Desire; Hugh Wood's The Isles of Greece and as well as a piece by NMC's founder Colin Matthews.
Finally, Slide Action took to the stage to perform Sasha Scott's Hypernova, an NMC commission for this concert. Then we heard Ryan Latimer's C. Exigua and Matthew Locke's Flatt Consort. Finally ESTAMPIE by Alex Paxton was a rowdy and exciting close to the concert.
We are due to release Slide Action's debut album later this year, which features new commissions along with several works heard in this concert!
It’s exhilarating, exhausting but utterly committed: it is music that never asks “is this allowed?” it just does it anyway, and kicks the cat on the way out.
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