Composer Snapshots

Philip Headlam has conducted and played concert music and operas by many of the world’s leading composers, working directly on world premieres with Federico Amendola, Georges Aperghis, Pierre Bartholomee, John Burge, Jonathan Dove, Luca Francesconi, Julian Grant, Kenneth Hesketh, Errollyn Wallen, Judith Weir as well as with Harrison Birtwistle, Richard Causton, Chaya Czernowin, Henri Dutilleux, Jose Evangelista, Benedict Mason, Colin Matthews, John Metcalf, Frederic Rzewski, Roger Smalley and John Tavener. He has conducted music by -U.K. composers: Julian Anderson, Simon Bainbridge, Luke Bedford, Martin Butler, Gavin Bryars, John Casken, Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Stephen Oliver -French composers: Pascal Dusapin, Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail -American composers: John Adams, Eve Beglarian, John Eaton, John Harbison, Lou Harrison, David Lang, Stephan Montague, Steve Reich, Carl Ruggles, Michael Torke -Canadian composers: John Beckwith, R. Murray Schafer, John Weinzweig and world premieres by Howard Bashaw, Talivaldis Kenins, Owen Underhill and John Armstrong -Quebecois composers Denys Bouliane, Sean Ferguson and Claude Vivier and many of the 20th century’s most important composers including Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Varese, Luigi Dallapiccola as well as Georgy Kurtag, Christobal Hallfter, Bernd Zimmermann, Hans Werner Henze, Giacinto Scelsi, Luciano Berio, Udo Zimmermann and Pierre Boulez.

‘ I regard it as vital for all musicians to engage with the language and expression of music and art as it is created and exists in their own time.
Composers of every age in history face the challenge of writing music that contains the expression of human perception and experience. So we rightly revere, perform and keep alive music from the past that captures that expression at the highest creative level of invention, inspiration and craftsmanship .
But our lives differ considerably from societies of decades and centuries past. In order to belong to our own age, it is important to focus our attention on and perform the music of our own time.
It is the composers who live and work now who capture our commonly shared experience, sensations, events, language, interactions and the forms that surround us with their creative responses in music and thus give shape to our understanding and expression of the world we live in.’

Philip H