OPL Wind Quartet Performs "New Found Journal"
Posted By kerryturner on November 10, 2006
Over the past year, the wind quartet from the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra (OPL Wind Quartet) has been performing my 8-minute, swashbuckling adventure piece entitled “The New-Found Journal”. Interestingly enough, this piece was orginally composed in 2001 for the Melton Tuba Quartet! It has proven to be somewhat too difficult for tubas however (actually 2 euphoniums, 1 f-tuba and 1 c-tuba) and thus it has been reworked to become a piece for flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn. One would however be advised to continue to watch this space. “The Casbah of Tetouan” was also orginally deemed “unplayable” in the early days. I think that nowadays it is being played somewhere in thew world at least once a week.
Anyway, “The New-Found Journal” was composed while I was working with the Royal Philharmonic of Flanders in Antwerp and reading the novel “Nethaniel´s Nutmeg” by Giles Milton. I wrote the following as a forward to the piece:
“Perusing rows of ancient leather-bound volumes in a baronial private library, a browser pauses, his hand hovering over a burnished tome. The word “Journal,” embossed in gold, gleams through heavy dust and he slides it carefully from the shelf where it has sat, untouched, for decades…perhaps centuries. Gingerly he turns to the first yellowed page- and plunges into a world of swashbuckling adventure, recorded in evocative detail by a 16th-century spice trader. His seafaring escapades and exotic encounters are left to the imagination of the listener…”
The next performance is on December 3rd in Pontivy, Bretagne in France.
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