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Holloway: Fourth Idyll and Five Temperaments

(January 2008)

The latest in Robin Holloway’s series of Idylls for chamber orchestra, characterised by the composer as “light, playful and lyrical”, was premiered in November by the City of London Sinfonia conducted by Richard Hickox.

Fourth Idyll is performed by its co-commissioners in the coming months: the Hong Kong Sinfonietta on 27 March, and the Vasteras Sinfonietta on 24 April. Playing continuously, the work moves through a mosaic of fast sketches and linking passages, including “a sort of English hoe-down”, a waltz movement and a scherzo.

Holloway’s new wind quintet, Five Temperaments, commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia, was premiered in Leeds last month. The group travels to Krakow on 2 February to give the Polish premiere, returning for a UK tour including a performance on 6 February at the Wigmore Hall in London.

"How good that, in this noisy new century, composers are still producing works of such subtle, understated content and impeccable craftsmanship... Underpinning all is an emotional journey. The "five temperaments" of the title clearly refer not only to the five instrumentalists, but also to the five little movements that whisk us through a kaleidoscope of moods, mostly on the melancholic side, in barely ten minutes."
The Times

"His lyrical instincts repeatedly led these spiky instrumental conversations to resolve themselves in song: even when no simple tonality was discernible, his brightly coloured music felt rooted and secure... The fact that this deceptive little piece could hold its own against the Beethoven that preceded it, and the Ravel that followed, is a measure of Holloway's achievement".
The Independent

On 29 March the Residentie Orchestra gives the Dutch premiere of Holloway’s much-performed Debussy arrangement En blanc et noir, and in May Nacho Duato’s choreography of Gilded Goldbergs for the Compania Nacional de Danza travels to the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden.

Photo: Pippa Patterson

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