'Tinderbox': Marking Andersen's 150 centenary
This Sunday and Monday, the 26th and 27th January - 2025 marking 150 years since Hans Andersen’s death, will be premiered a platform concert performance of my musical stage-work?‘Tinderbox’ at Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, (near Warren Street tube)
It began with a journey on the bus with my wife to the dentist.
On the upper deck I read some little article on my phone, can’t remember where, about?Hans Andersen being invited ?by Charles Dickens?
to stay at his home in Gad’s Hill ?and overstaying his welcome, and thus straining their?relationship.?
I thought, what a wonderful subject for a chamber opera!?
So from 2018 I began researching and writing a few scenes and songs, in a splurge,?a mix of episodes which I took to my friend and collaborator
?on?‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ (British Library & New End Hampstead?productions), librettist, dramaturg and director Maureen Thomas
?in July 2022, and we started working together from then.
(Recently I learned from a good friend that Southampton?rep had done a play on this subject some years previously,?
but this is the first musical treatment of the subject, as far as I know.)
I have written for song cycle before with the ?singer/composer Elke Ulmer-Kracht and in many ways I feel that this whole piece is rather a lieder-like just piano and voice,
though I have added flute, the instrument I associate particularly with Hans Andersen, evoking the woods..the fairy tales of
my childhood, and there are also nods to Gilbert and Sullivan and music hall. Anyways the audience I’m sure will draw their own conclusions.
As a film composer I am always trying to give the whole film a musical cohesiveness, and I have tried to use repetitions of themes
in different harmonic ways, there is more to do on this but with barely three days to go before the?tech and first performance,?
I only just have time to prepare all the cues for the roughly 2.5 hour stage-work, and practice the ?piano!?
If you would like to come and see it, there are still tickets for both nights.
I enclose the link below