Projects

Programming/ Festivals

‘Meanwhile, top honours go to Philip Headlam, not only for his proficient conducting but also for instigating and programming this concert series.‘

Arts Desk, U.K.

Philip Headlam’s programming and leadership for concerts, opera and music festivals has drawn much success and praise in the press and media. Concert programs and festivals are conceived and constructed around selected themes and subjects in order to highlight lines of musical influence from within and across past centuries and in our own time with modern and contemporary music. Subjects have included successive generations of composers as teachers and pupils, unjustly neglected repertoire, unusual pieces and arrangements/re-scorings as well as highlighting artistic and musical movements focussed on specific subjects, genres, time periods or localities.
He endeavours for all of the individual pieces to form a strong relationship with each other to make a coherent entity and give audiences an opportunity to explore music’s connections to larger ideas and themes. Alongside the performances, he develops illuminating complementary events such as literary readings, film showings, small exhibitions and talks and discussions led by experts.

Recitation and Conversations: Georges Aperghis and his Contemporaries

Aperghis explores the human condition in all its complex expression and emotion, even language itself, which he renders into highly original music that blends gesture and sound by turns poignant, sophisticated, witty and disturbing though always moving and profound.

Neues Land, Neue Sprache at the Kurt Weill Festival Dessau, 2020

Faced with unexpected exile from a homeland and the daunting challenge for an established composer to write songs in a new language upon arrival in a new country, this concert celebrates the beginnings and eventual mastery by Kurt Weill of songs in English with three other Nazi-exiled emigre composers to the U.S. and Canada in the 1930s/40s

Swept Away: Music of a Lost Generation

Swept Away features music by German and Austrian composers who fled into exile in the early 1930s, persecuted and threatened with arrest for their Jewish origins, socialist political views and artistic modernism. Their music was banned from performance and publication, thus completely disappearing until long after WWII ended and even the deaths of many of the composers.

A Celebration of Henri Dutilleux

The Continuum Ensemble celebrated the music and life of one of the finest composers of our time, Henri Dutilleux in his 90th year. The program collects together all his important ensemble and chamber music for the first time.
Henri Dutilleux travelled from his home in Paris to attend the concert in the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London and spoke at a pre-concert talk reflecting on his life and music, in conversation with Kenneth Hesketh (program repeated at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge), April and May 2005.

East/West: Gamelan Music in America and Europe

A program of music on western instruments influenced by gamelan music of Bali and Java.
A distillation of East and West in which the distinctive sound of gamelan ensembles and Eastern musical languages converges with Western musical instruments and encompasses a wide range of colour and expression from the hypnotically contemplative to joyfully energetic.