Steve Martland - World Premiere

On Friday 28th August, the Zephirus Saxophone Quartet will present the world premiere of Steve Martland's Short Story in a late night concert at the Prestiegne Festival. Commissioned by the festival with funding from The Arts Council Wales, Martland's new work promises to be one of the concert highlights with the composer's characteristically fast paced, enegetic music sure to be as lively as ever.

Now in its twenty-seventh year, the Presteigne Festival has a long history of commissioning new music and in 2008 featured Joe Duddell, who was Martland's pupil at the Royal Academy of Music as composer in residence. The festival runs from the 27th August until the 1st September at various venues in and around the prictuesque Welsh town of Prestiegne.

On the very same evening Martland's 1995 work Beat the Retreat will also performed in the Royal Albert Hall at the BBC Proms.  Performed by the fantastic Netherlands Wind Ensemble the work was orignally commissions by the BBC for its Purcell tercentenary celebrations.  The composer descibes the work as dancing music and writes:

The use of a ground bass suggests formal Baroque models but
the shifted beats and polyrhythms also evoke Latin American,
and near the end, ‘techno’ dance music. Although the title
refers to the military ‘beating the retreat’ which originated in
the recall of troops to their barracks, the message intended here
is the opposite, namely, to go out. Endlessly obsessed with
nostalgia for a bygone age, society is in retreat.
By opposing this tendency we can beat it.

Steve Martland's Short Story will be premiered by the Zephirus Saxophone Quartet at St Andrew's Church, Presteigne on Friday 28th August at 21.30pm.  It will also be repeated by at the festival's family concert at the same venue on Sunday 30th August at 3pm.

• Steve Martland - Profile
• Prestiegne Festival of Music and the Arts
• BBC Proms 2009