Tag Archives: musical director

Review: Bushra El-Turk and Eleanor Knight, Silk Moth; Grimeborn, 9 August 2019

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Originally posted in Tempo: a Quarterly Review of New Music:

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When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.1
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Review: Grimeborn Festival stages daring triple bill featuring El-Turk’s Silk Moth

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Originally posted at I Care If You Listen:

Shira Agmon, Camille Maalawy, Aivale Cole and Sophie Atalar in Ruthless Jabiru // Silk Moth (Director Heather Fairbairn, Set & Costume Designer Charlotte Henery, Lighting Designer Sean Gleason, Video Designer Sapphire Goss) © Lidia Crisafulli

Caroline Potter 

It’s summer opera festival season in the UK—so, are you a Glyndebourne or a Grimeborn person? Country house in Sussex, or a converted factory in east London? Mostly standard repertoire, or an adventurous programme with plenty of contemporary discoveries? Membership advised if you want to attend, or accessible pricing? Picnic on the lawn in the supper interval, or walk round the corner to the finest Turkish kebab joints in town?
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Press Release: Ruthless Jabiru to make Grimeborn Festival debut with all-female programme of music

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London chamber orchestra Ruthless Jabiru will deliver Silk Moth, its first fully-staged production for fringe opera stalwart Grimeborn Festival at London’s Arcola Theatre over a five performance season from 09-11 August 2019.

A story of vulnerability and complicity told through the music of Bushra El-Turk, Liza Lim and Cassandra Miller, Ruthless Jabiru’s Silk Moth will examine the complex tragedies of honour crime, family violence and female (dis)empowerment in Britain and beyond.
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Review: 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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Blog: 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 →