Author Archives: Kelly Lovelady

Arcola announces 2019 Grimeborn Opera Festival

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Originally posted at Arcola Theatre :

Template 258x173.jpgPress Releases / 23 May 2019

Arcola Theatre has announced the 16 productions that make up the 2019 Grimeborn Opera Festival.

The festival, which is returning for its thirteenth successive year, features bold new versions of classic operas, rarely-seen and long-forgotten works, and brand new pieces from some of the most exciting up-and-coming opera artists. £12 tickets are available for every single show in the season.

Following their smash-hit The Rape of Lucretia (Winner of the 2019 Off West End Award for Best Opera Production), Julia Burbach and Peter Selwyn reunite for a thrilling new take on Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Arcola produces the first London performances of Continue reading →

BBC Radio 3 – Hear and Now: Gloria Coates

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Kate Molleson presents three symphonies by American composer Gloria Coates performed by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra [in which I am co-conducting I. Cercando di trovare of Gloria Coates Symphony No.11 “Philemon und Baucis”]

Mixtape #005

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Ruthless Jabiru, King’s College London / Arditti Quartet, Wigmore Hall review – delicate, dedicated modernism

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Originally posted at The Arts Desk :

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Compelling refugee-themed concert from Australian ensemble and radical new sounds from avant-garde veterans

by  | Tuesday, 13 March 2018

★★★★✩

Ruthless Jabiru is an all-Australian chamber orchestra based in London. It is the brainchild of conductor Kelly Lovelady, who in recent years has geared the ensemble towards political and environmental concerns. Previous projects have highlighted environmental damage in central Australia and the campaign to end sponsorship by oil companies in the arts sector. For Saturday’s concert, Lovelady and her colleagues turned their attentions to the humanitarian crisis of refugees setting out for Australia by sea.
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Ruthless Jabiru – music in solidarity

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Originally posted at Platforma Arts + Refugees Network :

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By Kelly Lovelady

This weekend I will conduct a musical programme in solidarity with our brothers and sisters seeking asylum by sea in the beautiful chapel of King’s College London.

My ensemble Ruthless Jabiru is a London chamber orchestra dedicated to humanitarian stories. A dual advocacy for contemporary composers and Activist narratives reflects our citizen duty as artists to engage ever more deeply with the world around us; giving voice to the truths of our allies, interrogating the accountability of our leaders and championing solidarity in all its forms.

As I collect my thoughts on another International Women’s Day I have been reflecting on the cult of familiarity and how deep it runs. In concert music culture we are dogged by this Continue reading →

The Growing Edge: Ruthless Jabiru to examine asylum policy

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Originally posted at Loud Mouth :

Template 258x173.jpgIn a time when democracy and basic principles of justice are precarious, there are musicians who are finding ways to use their music to support the greater good.

Written by: Kelly Lovelady

Ruthless Jabiru, a London chamber orchestra of Australian musicians, will use its forthcoming performance to foster a revival of empathy towards refugees.

Centred around the world premiere of The Drowners, a major new orchestral song cycle by British-Australian composer Andrew Ford, the project will honour tidal forces and the many lives lost seeking asylum by sea. This focal work will be framed by the music of composers Nicole Lizée, Rosalind PageWolfgang Rihm and Fausto Romitelli to conjure a muted submarine dreamscape: a dark world of distorted gravity, out of body experience  Continue reading →

The Drowners

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Originally posted at Resonate Magazine :

Template 258x173Andrew Ford writes about his work The Drowners for baritone voice and chamber orchestra, about to be premiered in London on 10 March. The same concert by the UK-based Ruthless Jabiru includes a premiere of a work for strings, percussion and tape by Rosalind Page.

In my sequence of songs, The Drowners, a surfer struggles against the rip (or dreams he does); a drowning man is dragged back from the cold North Sea by his wife, as his laughing child watches from the beach; a toddler drowns in a well in the 19th-century colony of Augusta, Western Australia; grieving parents are visited by the wraiths of their drowned children; a man, out of his depth all his life, drowns when he swims ‘too far out’; the King of Naples is believed to lie at the bottom of the sea, his eyes having turned to pearls. You might be forgiven for thinking I have an obsession with drowning.
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