FULL LENGTH BIOGRAPHY

Based in Manchester, its distinctive concert series and mini-festivals have featured commissions and other premieres of works by a wide range of leading composers including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (Master of the Queen’s Music and Psappha’s Patron), Anthony Gilbert, Gordon McPherson, Karen Tanaka, Ronald Caltabiano, Rebecca Saunders, John Casken, Piers Hellawell, Edward Cowie and Larry Goves. The ensemble has a particular association with Steven Mackey (whose music the group introduced to the UK), featuring his music on tours and in high-profile concerts, including a co-commission with the Cheltenham Festival in 2007 and an appearance at the 2008 RNCM Mackey festival. Psappha recently presented a major survey of the music of Claude Vivier, in association with the BBC Singers with which it appeared in broadcast concerts in London and Lancaster. Along with programmes of works by György Ligeti and György Kurtág, amongst others, the Vivier concert from Lancaster was made widely available as a streaming webcast, using the latest technology.

In 2000 Psappha gave the premiere of MR EMMET TAKES A WALK, a music-theatre work by Maxwell Davies (with direction and libretto by David Pountney) which it co-commissioned. Praised in The Independent as ‘top rate’ and ‘mesmerising from start to finish’, the award-winning production went on to enjoy acclaimed European and UK tours in 2001 and 2002, the interpretation preserved in an original-cast recording on Psappha’s own CD label now available through iTunes.

Psappha is invited to appear throughout the UK and abroad has appeared at such major music festivals as Aldeburgh, Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham, Huddersfield, Oxford and St. Magnus Festival (Orkney). A busy summer in 2008 takes the ensemble on return visits to the Aldeburgh and Cheltenham Festivals (broadcast performances of Kurtág and Maxwell Davies, respectively) as part of Radio 3’s Discovering Music series.

Highlights of 2008/09 season include appearances in the International Concert Series of both Sheffield and Lancaster (the latter involving three further webcast concerts), a CD recording of music by Mackey, and a major residency at the 2009 St Magnus Festival where Psappha will play a prominent role in both the public and the workshop arena, including a new production of Maxwell Davies’s chamber opera THE LIGHTHOUSE.

In 2004 Psappha made its debut at the BBC Proms with a late-night concert marking Maxwell Davies’s 70th birthday – ‘an inspiring, revelatory event that made you mighty glad you were there,’ according to The Financial Times. It also appeared in special Henze and Maxwell Davies portrait series in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and gave the first public concert at Stormont Castle in Belfast.

Psappha has toured to both North and South America (with performances of Caltabiano’s Margaret Atwood-based music-theatre piece MARRYING THE HANGMAN in Sacramento, San Francisco and at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Argentine premiere of Stockhausen’s KONTAKTE in Buenos Aires); and Australia (a Maxwell Davies programme at the 2000 Barossa Music Festival in Adelaide) as well as in Belgium, France, Holland, Ireland, Jersey (2006 Fêtes des Arts), Portugal and Spain.

Psappha established its own CD label in 2004 with unconducted performances of two Maxwell Davies music-theatre pieces, EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING and MISS DONNITHORNE’S MAGGOT, featuring baritone Kelvin Thomas and soprano Jane Manning. The disc attracted glowing critical acclaim. Psappha has also recorded six CDs for other labels, including FANTASTIC ISLANDS, a collection of premiere recordings of music by Maxwell Davies and others, hailed in The Sunday Times as ‘a brilliantly accomplished debut disc’. A number of its CDs are now available through iTunes.

Distinguished soloists with whom Psappha has worked include Sir Thomas Allen (Walton’s FAÇADE, Buxton), Phyllis Bryn-Julson (MARRYING THE HANGMAN, US tour), Philip Langridge (Stravinsky’s RENARD, Salford Lowry), Robert Tear (Stravinsky’s THE SOLDIER’S TALE, Salford Lowry) and the actress Fiona Shaw (Maxwell Davies’s MISSA SUPER L’HOMME ARMÉ, BBC Proms).

Education projects represent an important and ongoing part of Psappha’s busy schedule both in the UK and abroad. Currently the University of Manchester’s Contemporary Ensemble in Residence, it collaborates with people of all ages, devising and participating in composition workshops and courses, and was awarded the Swatch City Life Award for Best Concert Series and Education Work.

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