Perfect Offering Explore Ensemble

• Cassandra Miller (b. 1976): Perfect Offering:
• 1 Miller: Perfect Offering 18:44
• Lisa Illean (b. 1983): Weather a Rare Blue:
• 2 Illean: Weather a Rare Blue 11:01
• Lawrence Dunn (b. 1991): Suite:
• 3 Dunn: Suite 22:42
• Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967): murmurs:
• 4 Saunders: murmurs 26:16
• murmurs (Binaural Mix):
• 5 Saunders: murmurs (Binaural Mix) 26:16
• Total Runtime 01:44:59

Info for Perfect Offering

Perfect Offering invites the listener to journey with the ensemble, inhabiting and exploring four vibrant, imaginary landscapes. Each is underlined by themes of place and space, ecstasy and tranquillity, lightness and darkness, as well as ambience, transience, refraction, and silence. There is a diverse interest in harmony evident in the music collected here – each composer exhibits a distinctive idiolect, ranging from Cassandra Miller’s entirely white note radiance to Rebecca Saunders’ haunting atonal timbralism, Lisa Illean’s spectrally-tinged, weathered sounds, and Lawrence Dunn’s wonky and surrealist tonalities.

This album bears the fruit of an awakening. Explore Ensemble’s pent-up energies – confined and distracted during the pandemic – were at last released over the course of 2022, with a return to concerts and recordings. That busy year was filled with reconnection and growth. This album presents Explore Ensemble’s resulting perspective on chamber music repertoire. It is music that, by invoking either actual or imagined spaces, goes beyond the “chamber” and the genre’s historical allegiance to the slippery notion of musical autonomy.

Described by Kate Molleson (BBC Radio 3) as one of the UK’s ‘top new music bands’, Explore Ensemble is a London chamber group which performs, commissions, and promotes new music. Built around a core sextet, Explore Ensemble's reputation for outstanding performances and inventive curation stems from its advocacy of some of the most original composers of today, combined with its revival of landmark works from the recent past. In 2021, Explore Ensemble was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Ensemble Prize to support its artistic and organisational development.

Programme Notes: "I wrote the first drafts of music for this piece during a long period of convalescence, at a time when I felt pretty useless (ok, deeply useless). I discovered that even when I didn’t have the will to do much at all, I could lie in bed and push notes around (laptop sitting on my chest as we all do), in sweaty pyjamas. It was all a bit gross. This time overlapped with the early days of lockdown, depressing and very confusing.

At that time, I had the quote in my head ‘ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering’ (Leonard Cohen), and the piece began to be about bells somehow—how they swing, and how they mark passing time. The piece is not at all about Leonard Cohen, but with this mantra-like quote in mind, the process of composing became a meditation on the imperfect perfection of this tiring body and all the uselessness of plans.

After making a few drafts with my own ideas of what swinging bells might sound like (and the patterns they might make together), I realised I needed instead to understand more about bells in reality. I then worked with closely with a recording of a peal of bells from a convent in France, from which the composition now derives all of its material. In particular, there was magic to be found in slowing the recording down, hearing and singing along to hidden melodies that emerged as bell-resonances combined like interleaving lines in renaissance polyphony." (Cassandra Miller)

Explore Ensemble:
Nicholas Moroz, artistic director
Taylor MacLennan, flute
Philip Haworth, oboe
Alex Roberts, clarinets
Angela Wai Nok Hui, percussion
Joseph Havlat, piano (tracks 2, 4)
Siwan Rhys, piano (tracks 1, 3, 4)
David López Ibáñez, violin
Oscar Perks, violin
Morag Robertson, viola
Deni Teo, cello

Explore Ensemble
Since its founding in 2012 at the Royal College of Music by composers Nicholas Moroz and Arne Gieshoff, Explore Ensemble has featured on BBC Radio 3's New Music Show and at festivals and venues throughout the UK and beyond, including Centro Pecci Prato (IT), hcmf// (UK), LCMF (UK), No Bounds (UK), Transit (Belgium), November Music (Netherlands), Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, Cafe OTO, Snape Maltings, Glasgow Cathedral Festival, Cambridge Music Festival, City University of London, the Greenwich Loudspeaker Orchestra Series, the Royal Northern College of Music, the University of Leeds, and the University of Oxford / EXPO Oxford.

May 2023 will see the release of Perfect Offering with the HCR label, including music by Cassandra Miller, Lisa Illean, Rebecca Saunders, and Lawrence Dunn. Other releases include two portrait albums of Oliver Leith and James Weeks’ music on the Another Timbre label, Me Hollywood and Summer, which featured on Bandcamp’s Best of Contemporary Classical 2021 list.

Explore Ensemble focuses on a small number of commissions each season, working closely with composers to create more personal works. Since 2017 commissions have included Patricia Alessandrini, Lisa Illean, Scott McLaughlin, John Croft, Edwin Hillier, Oliver Leith, Joanna Bailie, Angharad Davies, Lawrence Dunn, Mark Fell, Neil Luck, and Beatrice Dillon. 2022 saw the group commission video artist Rebecca Salvadori for a trio portrait films on its projects with Dunn, Davies, and Fell, currently in preparation.

Other featured composers include Natasha Barrett, James Dillon, Lawrence Dunn, Michael Finnissy, Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey, Catherine Lamb, Mauro Lanza, Andrea Valle, Luigi Nono, Enno Poppe, Kaija Saariaho, Fausto Romitelli, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino, and many others.

On special occasions Explore Ensemble expands to perform larger works. For example, the ensemble gave the UK premiere of Sciarrino's song cycle Carnaval with the EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble at hcmf// in 2018, and the first London performance of Romitelli's complete ‘Professor Bad Trip’ cycle at the RCM in 2014.

The ensemble also works with guest soloists, for example, soprano Juliet Fraser, with whom the ensemble gave the UK premiere of Rebecca Saunders’ work O Yes & I; mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, with whom the ensemble gave the UK premiere of Catherine Lamb’s Parallaxis Forma; and clarinetist Benjamin Mellefont, who gave the UK premiere of Kaija Sarriaho’s work Figura.

Explore Ensemble's work has been supported by organisations including Arts Council England, PRS Foundation, Diaphonique, the Hinrichsen Foundation, the RVW Trust, and Acción Cultural Española.

Nicholas Moroz
s a composer and co-founded Explore Ensemble in 2012. His music has been performed by musicians including the GBSR Duo, Sebastiaan Kemner, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, ensemble recherche, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, and the Britten-Pears Ensemble, at venues and festivals such as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Abbaye de Royaumont, Moscow Philharmonic, Aldeburgh Festival, St Magnus International Festival, and EXPO Oxford.

He studied composition at the Royal College of Music with Jonathan Cole, Kenneth Hesketh, Simon Holt, and Gilbert Nouno. He also completed a musicology Masters degree at the University of Oxford, where he is currently studying an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded DPhil in Music (Composition) degree. His research involves composition with acoustic instruments and live electronics, and his musicological work investigates the role of technology in Luigi Nono’s live electronic music. His supervisors are Professors Jonathan Cross and Martyn Harry. He has also published articles and given conference presentations on the music of Fausto Romitelli and Morton Feldman.

Besides music he also enjoys the outdoors, sci-fi, tropical plants, and sampling his fellow ensemble members’ food and coffees.

Booklet for Perfect Offering