The line-up for the 2017 BBC Proms was announced on 20 April, featuring several works by Faber Music composers, most notably Tom Coult who has been commissioned to write a short orchestral work to open the festival. St John’s Dance will be premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner on 14 July.
Later in the festival Anders Hillborg’s Sirens will receive its UK premiere on 28 July, with sopranos Hannah Holgersson and Ida Falk Winland joining the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under James Gaffigan. Hillborg’s most ambitious work to date, Sirens is inspired by the dangerous yet alluring sirens in Homer's Odyssey. Recently recorded to great acclaim on BIS, the work dramatises the sirens’ ever-increasing desperation in attempting to manipulate Ulysses with a soundworld which is at once beguiling and unsettling.
On 5 August Thomas Adès will conduct the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in the London premiere of Francisco Coll’s Mural alongside his own Polaris and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A thrilling and audacious work, Mural was premiered by the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg under Gustavo Gimeno in September. The 24-minute piece is an extraordinary achievement, handling vast forces with an impressive single-mindedness to create a five-movement work of stark and unsettling poetry. In Mural, Coll says, he feels ‘that a period in my work is closing. As if across a mural, the piece presents a synthesis of the musical language I have developed in the last decade. Its structure and harmony have been a constant obsession through the two years it took me to complete. I had the feeling of returning to the traditional problems of composition. I am trying to approach simplicity in each new work; structure, rhythm and harmony are crucial in the process, and melody is becoming more and more important.’
Full details of the 2017 Proms season can be found here.