Gemini at 50
Gemini at 50 - February 2024
Cast your mind back to 1973, an SPNM (Society for Promotion of New Music) Composers’ Weekend at Reading University. Peter Wiegold, a PhD student of David Lumsdaine at Durham University arrived with a work called Gemini for two clarinets and two percussion. A good piece that later received an airing at The Purcell Room. Roll forward a few months to 1974 - a kitchen in Putney. The composer of Gemini and the two clarinettists who performed it, Edward Pillinger and Ian Mitchell (plus possibly the percussion players???) decided to form an eponymous ensemble. Roll forward throughout a busy and successful fifty years to 2024 and one finds Gemini still around and celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of that meeting. On 25th February there is a joint celebration – the fifty years of the ensemble and the launch of a CD of chamber music by Nicola LeFanu, a close friend and colleague of Gemini for c40 years.
The ensemble has reached many parts of the world: Taiwan; Australia; Oman, Latvia; much of Europe and the UK. There have been twenty-three commercial recordings. Commissions total around one hundred, with close to a 50-50 split between male and female composers. Education work has been equally as important as concert work, building on the highly successful and influential vision of Peter Wiegold who directed the ensemble until 1985. He then moved on to pastures new when the Guildhall School of Music and Drama invited him to set up a new programme based on his pioneering view of music education. This became the Conservatoire’s highly successful ‘Performance and Community Skills’ department. Ian Mitchell then took over as Director and continues to the present. The Gemini ethos did not change with the Director – performance and education side by side – simply added to the splendid foundations of Peter’s Directorship. There has been a stylistically wider concert repertoire, more international tours and more tertiary education work alongside the primarily early-years, secondary schools and community focus. Regular contact has been maintained with composer friends from the 1970s onwards such has David Lumsdaine, Nicola LeFanu, Helen Roe and others, culminating in that new CD of chamber music by Nicola LeFanu.
I am not sure what the next fifty years will hold for us. Certainly, there are, and will continue to be, plenty of huge challenges for the arts, and sadly the world for small independent chamber ensembles is so very different from what it was in1974. So, let’s see...
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​​​​​ The saga of a covid-related recording of for clarinet and strings Métier msv 28608
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The latest Gemini CD will be officially launched on 12 March. However, I already have some copies and was very relieved to receive them as there had been plenty of bumps on the way. Whilst half of the items had been recorded several years ago, the other half had to be recorded. Everything was fixed by the end of February 2020: players; sound; venue; record company schedule, all were eventually pulled together somehow for recording in early October. Guess what then came on the scene soon after everything was in place: yep, the coronavirus pandemic. After experiencing the first lockdown I became extremely nervous about the possibility of having to postpone the date. As time went on it seemed as if it might become very likely that we would need to postpone. That would cause all sorts of issues including financial and; the nightmare of trying to reschedule and get all elements together again. However, ​​​checking with the church
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liaison person all seemed well, and the players and producer/engineer all agreed to go ahead with lots of protocols in place and assuming no Government interference! Then just five days before the sessions the liaison person rang to tell me that the vicar had decided to close the church to all external bookings. Disaster!
She understood how serious this was for us and very kindly arranged to go with the church warden to put our case to the vicar. He eventually relented though demanding a detailed risk assessment. Luckily, David Lefeber (producer) and I had spoken prior to the news of the possible cancellation and I had drawn up a comprehensive document. I asked in turn for details of the church’s protocols, but none were ever supplied.
So, all seemed set until two days before the day I was informed that the church heating system had broken down and couldn’t be fixed until after our date. Luckily, David had several heaters that he could bring on the day. Alas, whilst setting the heaters up I overloaded the socket and caused a fuse to blow! It was a pretty impressive bang that scared the living daylights out of us. We salvaged most via a socket a long way at the back of the church and were ready to go.
The musicians were required to be 2 metres apart and this took some getting used to: six in a semi-circle meant opposite ends were a long way from each other. Also, David decided because of musos being spread out he had to mic everyone separately, something he never normally does. Two of the four composers whose works we were to record were free to be with us virtually. So David set up an elaborate system of zoom to enable them to see and hear us. Any comments from them were made by a mobile phone link to David in the ‘box’ (i.e. the vestry) and relayed to us.
All these various issues: distance; recording set-up; zoom/phone conversations with delays; lost connections, meant for a long, long eight and a half hours for some of us. Still, we managed it. My Gemini colleagues played wonderfully, David managed to achieve a splendid sound, composers were happy, and I’m very happy indeed with the results. The disc pressing was done in Austria and just squeaked in before an enforced covid and Christmas break for the firm. Booklet materials just met the printer’s deadline. Phew, all was ok.
Ah, I forgot. Brexit meant that there was possibly additional VAT floating around. I’m keeping my head down about that. Ah, I also forgot that my boxes of discs were stuck in Calais for some time and at the time of writing Divine Art, the record company, which is based in Vermont still awaits its batch, as do the marketing/PR people. I am hoping that Naxos who distribute worldwide for Divine Art have by now indeed got something to distribute. All-in-all surprisingly I found this project quite an exhausting saga, especially as I also had to learn a few notes and find a good reed for the recording. Still, very soon after our sessions the second lockdown came, which meant all I could find to do was stare at the tv all day with a few cans by my side to enable me to recover. (That’s a joke. The dog would never allow that!) Despite everything I’m delighted with the results: the production of the booklet; the sound; the performances and the music. The latter being what it’s all about.
Ian Mitchell Director, Gemini 16/02/21
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This is the background to Gemini's latest recording project culminating in a CD entitled
' 'for clarinet and strings'
released in June 2021
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Why for clarinet and strings? Well, obviously the content is works for that mix of instruments. However, the project actually emerged from recordings made in 1995. Gemini had been a prize winner in the 1993 Prudential Awards for the Arts. We decided to use the money to record various works. It proved to be a challenge to find a record company to take the mixed repertoire. A single composer CD was generally the norm ─ easy to find on the alphabetically arranged shelves and in catalogues. So the tapes gathered dusted on my shelves, apart from Nicola LeFanu’s splendid clarinet quintet Invisible Places which in 2017 found an outlet on our disc of music by her and David Lumsdaine (Mandala 3 on Divine Art msv28565). There were three major works languishing: by Cyril Scott, Rebecca Clarke and Howard Skempton. Wanting to put them before the public I hit on the idea of the Scott and Clarke being the basis of a disc of works for clarinet and strings. (More of the Skempton later). Nicola had written a work for clarinet and string trio to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Gemini’s foundation under Peter Wiegold. Here were three characterful and very different works to form a strong foundation for a programme. I then decided to seek a new work to complement the Clarke duo for clarinet and viola to add to the scarce repertoire for the duo. I was keen to continue a long-standing relationship between Sadie Harrison and Gemini knowing she would have an individual take on the ensemble. Indeed, she did in a most exciting way. Originally clapsticks and narration were to be played by the two performers, but the practicality of holding an instrument, narrating, and striking clapsticks somehow became trickier as compositional ideas expanded. So two further members of the ensemble were drafted in. They took up the challenge with more than a little relish adding a touch of exoticism to the clarinet and strings brief for the disc.
The duo concept led me to another long-standing friend of the ensemble, to Howard Skempton whose lovely Lullaby for clarinet and cello we had recorded for cassette many years ago. That in turn led me to thinking of Howard’s splendid Gemini Dances the other major work recorded in 1995. The line-up definitely expanded on the disc’s title, adding flute, percussion and piano, but I have long wanted people to be aware of the piece: to listen to and to perform. So moving on from the CD I asked Stephen Sutton of Divine Art if he would consider releasing it as a stand-alone download. He thought this wouldn’t have the impact we wanted and said why not add it to the disc as a bonus track. Why not? A terrific idea. Last but not least the little gem from Tony Coe had been on my mind ever since Tony first told me in 2006 that he’d expanded my commission on behalf of the ABRSM for a tiny clarinet and piano piece. He rescored it for clarinet and string quartet
and added two further miniature movements. It’s a perfect encore to end a quintet concert.
This project was never intended to profile the clarinet, rather simply to have ensembles including both clarinet and string instruments. Only once does the clarinet actually take centre stage ─ for the short opening movement of Nicola’s quartet. At times, the focus can be very much on a string instrument as in Lullaby and the Scott quintet is most definitely an ensemble of equals. Rebecca Clarke and Sadie Harrison integrate the two instruments in totally different ways, both achieving a remarkable range of colours in doing so. Indeed, it is the richness of the palette across this varied collection of pieces that I find so enjoyable rather than any unifying theme.
Ian Mitchell
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This is the Foreword to the CD Homage - chamber music by Philip Grange
by Gemini's Director, Ian Mitchell
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Gemini and Philip Grange have had an association going back nearly 30 years from the early 1990s developing more closely when Grange and I were both on the staff at the University of Exeter, from the mid-1990s, and where Gemini became Ensemble-in-Association for eleven years. The association has included three commissions: Des fins sont des commencements (1994) written for a national tour to mark the 60th birthday of Grange’s teacher and close friend, Peter Maxwell Davies; A Puzzle of Shadows (1997) and Shifting Thresholds originally discussed in the early two thousands, which came to fruition when both the composer and I had space for it, spurred on by Gemini’s desire to mark Grange’s 60th birthday in 2016. We have also recorded two CDs of his chamber music before this one: Dark Labyrinths released by Black Box in 2000 and Darkness Visible in 2006 on the Metier label. Both were a Critic’s Choice of the Year in Gramophone magazine. In addition, Gemini has given around thirty performances of various works, toured the UK and, memorably, Taiwan with the composer. So, it was with enormous pleasure that I said yes when Philip said he would like to record Shifting Thresholds – the major chamber work of just over 30 minutes in length that he wrote for Gemini to premiere in his 60th birthday concert at the University of Manchester in December 2016.
It is a fascinating work that includes elements new to his compositional palette, and perhaps surprising for others to discover. The work is inspired by Samuel Becket’s extraordinary novel Malone Dies and, as I have written elsewhere, familiarity with the score shows things absorbed: passing moments of absolute stillness found in Beckett and in music by Morton Feldman, a close friend of Beckett; there often appears to be less of a sense of narrative driving the music forward in a typical Grange way, and more of a Beckettian reflective exploration of material in different contexts or from different angles, sometimes as if half forgotten, perhaps – at times the music revolving more than marching onwards towards a goal. Indeed, there is in essence no goal, the music apparently heading to a climax only to distort and fall apart, struggling to continue and finally expiring … There are also some novel (for Grange) instrumental techniques used in passing such as multiphonics for the bass clarinet (multiple sounds produced simultaneously), and quarter tones for strings.
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All four works on the disc pay homage not just in name, but more deeply through Grange exploring and assimilating elements of each artist’s work, shining his own light on them by absorbing these elements into his own language.
As ever with Phil, it was a highly stimulating project to work on, the fruits of which we are pleased and eager to share widely.
