Dillon 1 – Red Note Ensemble at hcmf//
Creative Tourist
Leading Scottish ensemble Red Note has been a prominent purveyor of James Dillon’s work for the last decade, bringing premieres of his large-scale works to the festival in 2013, and then again in 2017. This continuous relationship with the composer is palpable: they perform his seemingly insurmountable music with poise, carrying it carefully while also conveying its fragile breaking point. In this concert, they deliver the world premiere of his immense new work Emblemata: Carnaval.
Red Note delivers Dillon’s new composition alongside music from Luke Styles, who describes his new piece Five Phase Sphere as ‘abstract, with no programme whatsoever’. Written more for the instrumentation it uses than for any narrative reason, it comes from a place of unbridled intuition, focusing on resonances and combinations. Its title is a candid explanation of the material: five phases, musically connected, orbiting in a sphere. Red Note completes the programme with a new work from emerging Scottish composer Aileen Sweeney, an accordionist who uses her folk roots as a vessel for protesting the growing social inequalities in our environment.
