Beside the Sea is an ambitious and innovative work of music theatre by composer Ian Wilson for violinist, soundtrack and found objects that explores ideas around memory, personhood and how to evoke a life and its trajectory through music. Wilson wanted to make this piece since his father died four years ago after a long battle with Alzheimer’s; the goal is a work of art which examines how much of a role memory has in making a person and what part music can also have in that. Beside the sea is a universal and uplifting story of changing minds and bodies, of ageing, using elements of Wilson’s father’s life as found objects around which the narrative has been built. The work’s title is multi-faceted and ambivalent, referencing musical, physical, temporal, and cognitive domains.
After its premiere in September 2022, By the Sea has been presented in several cities in Ireland. Highlights include performing at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, as well as at the Spitalfields Music Festival 2023 – London. In Belgrade, it will be presented for the first time in an adapted concert version.
The concert is organized in cooperation with the Association of Music Artists of Serbia and the Theater Vuk (Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 77а). Entrance to the concert is free.
Program:
Dejan Despić
Sonata for violin
Ian Wilson
Beside the Sea for violin, tape and objets trouvées
Biography:
Dušica Mladenović graduated with a master’s degree from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad under Prof. Dejan Mihailović and has taken masterclasses with professors such as Marina Yashvili, Igor Ozim, Ilya Grubert and Antoinette Lohmann. She has participated in over 150 performances as a member of various chamber ensembles in Serbia, France, Germany, Austria, Turkey, The Netherlands, Ireland, England and China. She has given a large number of solo recitals and performed as a soloist with the Belgrade String Orchestra “Dušan Skovran” and the Belgrade Philharmonic. As soloist she gave the world premiere of the violin concerto “Socrates Ungraved” by Ian Wilson/Erik Satie with the Belgrade Philharmonic in 2018. She has performed at festivals such as Mokranjac Days, Konstantinus, BEMUS, Tribina Kompozitora, FRONT and KoMA and has premiered works by many domestic and foreign composers. She recently performed in Ireland’s National Concert Hall with pianist Hugh Tinney and at London’s Spitalfields Festival as soloist in Ian Wilson’s music theatre piece “Beside the Sea”, after touring it in Ireland in autumn 2022.
Dušica has played with the Belgrade String Orchestra “Dušan Skovran”, the Žebeljan Orchestra and has collaborated with the orchestras of St. George Strings and Muzikon. She is a permanent member of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and the Anime String Quartet and, more recently, the Anime Violin Trio. She has recorded for RTS, Farpoint Recordings, Oboe Classics, Riverrun Records, Sequoia music label, Dreyer Gaido and Metropolis Music.
Ian Wilson was born in Belfast in 1964 and began composing while at university. He has since written over 200 works, including operas, concertos, 20 string quartets, a range of orchestral and chamber music and multi-media pieces. His compositions have been performed and broadcast on six continents and presented at festivals including the BBC Proms, Venice Biennale and Frankfurt Bookfair and at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Royal Albert and Wigmore Halls, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw, Vienna’s Musikverein and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. Wilson has in recent years also worked with jazz musicians, Asian tabla and Chinese pipa players and traditional Irish singers; he has also collaborated with choreographers, theatre directors and electroacoustic and computer music composers.
In 1991 Ian’s first orchestral work, Running, Thinking, Finding, received the composition prize at the Ultima festival in Oslo and in 1992 he received the Macaulay Fellowship administered by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 1998 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland’s State-funded body of creative artists and in recent years he has been AHRB Research Fellow at the University of Ulster, An Foras Feasa post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Dundalk Institute of Technology and Associate Composer with both the Camerata Pacifica ensemble and the Ulster Orchestra. He was director of the Sligo New Music Festival from 2003 to 2011. Ian received a Major Individual Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2016.
There are commercially-available recordings of nearly fifty of Ian’s works on labels including Diatribe, Riverrun, Black Box, Timbre, Guild, Meridian and Chandos. His music is published by G. Ricordi & Co. and Universal Edition Ltd.
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