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Visiting Professor of Conducting Martyn Brabbins and the RCM Philharmonic perform 'On the Ringstreet' by RCM Head of Composition William Mival.
‘On the Ringstreet’ was written in 1996 for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Land Rover sponsored Sound Discovery programme and was first performed by the orchestra, conducted by Pascal Rophé in a studio recording that was later broadcast on Radio Three’s ‘Music in Our Time’. The ‘ringstreet’ of the title is the Ringstrasse of Vienna, a thoroughfare built at the end of the 19th century following the demolition of the city’s fortifications which, as recently as the late seventeenth century, had withstood repeated onslaughts from the Ottoman Empire. The Ringstrasse today is furnished with a diverse and highly decorative architecture ranging from ancient Greek (the Austrian Parliament) and mediaeval high Gothic (the Town Hall) to monumental imperial palaces and, in the first of these enormous buildings to be constructed, the Vienna opera house: each, however, actually built only within a very few years of each other. In the course of around seven minutes the piece takes something of a Viennese caffeine-fuelled tour of this stylistic confusion feeding, as it does so, on some of my favourite clichés from 19th century grand opera.
(Programme note © William Mival)
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