Colin joins the English Chamber Orchestra this week at the Bratislava Music Festival, performing Sir James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni Emmanuel, conducted by Kaspar Zehnder.
The work is one of Colin’s most performed pieces, and uses a battery of percussion instruments including tam-tams, two snare drums, congas, timbales, gongs, woodblocks and marimba, producing a range of tuned, untuned, skin, metal and wood sounds. Praised by the Financial Times as “a sure, confident, expertly engineered piece of soloist-versus-orchestra showmanship”, the piece is based on the Advent plainchant of the same name and was described by its composer as “a musical exploration of the theology behind the Advent message”. Seen and Heard International described Colin’s previous performance of the piece as “utterly spellbinding”.
This was Colin’s first concert with the orchestra. The most recorded chamber music orchestra in the world, the English Chamber Orchestra works consistently with the most significant musical figures in classical music, and particularly champions British music. The Bratislava Music Festival was founded after the Second World War to celebrate Slovakia’s rich cultural history, and has grown to be one of the most prominent cultural events in Slovakia.