SPOTLIGHT ON: The Manchester Collective
Interview with Artistic Director and General Manager
Interview with Artistic Director and General Manager
What interesting projects have you got in the pipeline?
Adam: Our next project is something we’re quite excited
about. It’s called Intimate Letters
with performances in Sheffield, Liverpool and two shows in Manchester, running
from March 23rd to March 26th. It’s the first in our
series of major commissions, we plan to commission one new major work every
year. We already play a lot of new music, but this is the chamber music we’d
like to commission. This project we’ve co-produced with the International
Anthony Burgess Foundation on the occasion of the centenary of Anthony
Burgess’s birth.
What we’ve done is commissioned composer Hugh Belling to write
a song-cycle which we have adapted from Burgess’s novel Inside Mr Enderby. The
song-cycle is scored for Baritone and String Quartet and the work is kind of a
series of character studies of these characters from the novel. It’s a highly
dramatic work; we’ve got actor and singer, Mitch Riley, coming from Paris which
will be really interesting. Whilst he’s an acclaimed operatic baritone, he also
has a background in physical theatre. He’s currently resident at École Internationale
de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, so he’ll really bring a highly theatrical, amusement
based feeling to the performance. Paired with the song-cycle, (Inside Mr Enderby), we’re playing
Janacek’s Second String Quartet, Intimate
Letters. The work is based on the letters between Janacek and his muse, who
was a much younger, married woman and Mitch will be performing in that as well.
Although it’s only scored for String Quartet, he’ll be reciting from the
letters in a very dramatic way.
So that’s the second project. Through the year, we’ve got
four additional projects, all radically different. We’ve got a cabaret show, a
tour with an accordion player, and we’ll be performing Messian’s Quartet for the End of Time at the end
of the year, so there’s a huge amount of variety. Ultimately we are now
programmed up to mid-2019, and we’ve got a really exciting project in the
pipeline with our first European tour coming up next year so there’s lots to
look forward to!