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| Dance of Dionysus for cello and piano, by Charlie Piper.
The composer Charlie Piper (b. 1982) comes from London, where he is finishing his masters at the Royal College of Music. He has studied with David Sawer, Kenneth Hesketh and Michael Zev Gordon, as a scholar with support from a Winifred Law Award, The South Square Trust, The Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
He has supplemented his studies with courses at Aldeburgh and Apeldoorn. He has been performed at the Huddersfield, Croydon and Cheltenham Music Festivals and by performers such as Apartment House, Nancy Ruffer, The Composers Ensemble, Musica Vitae, Alexandra Wood and Huw Watkins, The Lambeth Orchestra and the orkest "de ereprijs". Recently Charlie had his short ballet, Anima, performed by the English National Ballet, choreographed by Thomas Edur.
Charlie is the current recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize for which he was commissioned to compose a new work for the 2007 Cheltenham Festival and was also a winner at the 13th International Young Composers Meeting 2007 in Apeldoorn.
The composer provided us with the following background information on the "Dance of Dionysus":
Dionysus, known to the Romans as Bacchus, had two distinct origins. On the one hand, he was the god of wine, agriculture, and fertility of nature; on the other hand, he represents the outstanding features of mystery religions. Known as the Liberator (Eleutherios) he encouraged the practice of personal delivery from the daily world through physical or spiritual intoxication, madness and ecstasy. This work attempts to portray one of these ritualistic dances – relentless movement, growing from a single repeated note to a frenzied climax. |
