Last Sunday the percussion group from the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen premiered “Stellar Horizons”, a new piece of mine commissioned by the opera. They did a an amazing job with the piece and I’m very happy about the final result. Next performance will be at the old stage in a concert named Percussion Extravaganza on April 2.
The original version is for octet but I have a sextet version coming up. I have scored for a bounch of tuned gongs (have a look at the photo below…) and almost two octaves of dobacis (tuned temple bowls) and these instruments aren’t really found everywhere (we couldn’t even find all the dobacis for the concert…) so I’ll try to make a smaller version…
Per Jensen and his gongs
Henrik Thrane and his dobaci
We made a short clip of the concert that could be seen HERE.
Future plans for this piece is to include this piece on an upcoming chamber music album that we are working with. It would be great fun to record this and place it together with my String Quartet No. 1 (among other pieces) that we record this week, btw, with American string quartet Brooklyn Rider.
The percussion group from the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen
From left to right: Patrick Raab, Mads Hebsgaard, Mads Drewsen, Per Jensen, Henrik Malmgreen, Henrik Thrane, Marcus Wall, Tobias Broström (Mathias Friis-Hansen missing).