Luke Bedford UK première

Royal Festival Hall

The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Foyle Future Firsts programme brings together young musicians and professional orchestra members to rehearse, study and perform together. 

This April, Foyle Future Firsts participants conducted by Thomas Blunt will give the British première of Luke Bedford’s By the Screen in the Sun at the Hill on the Gold for ensemble (28 April, Royal Festival Hall).

The work was written for Ensemble Modern’s “into …” project, as part of which Bedford spent several weeks in Johannesburg. Its title derives from a visit to a drive-in cinema built on top of a 50-metre mine dump on the outskirts of the city. “The mixture of the stunning panorama across the city – showing all its wealth and poverty, viewed from a run-down car park where people lived in little houses behind the cinema screen, with traces of gold literally beneath their feet – seemed to me to sum up so much about the city.”

Luke Bedford: By the Screen in the Sun at the Hill on the Gold
for 18 players
UK première: 28/4/2012, London
Foyle Future First Orchestral Apprentices, cond. Thomas Blunt