Ayres, R: Valentine Tregashian dreams... of the Swiss Girl

Ayres studied composition, electronic music, and trombone. He moved to Den Haag to study with Louis Andriessen on the postgraduate composition course at the Royal Conservatoire. He settled in Holland permanently and since2006 has taught at the Amsterdam Conservatoire. Ayres’ postmodern style is eceletic, comic and theatrical.

When asked what inspires his writing he replied ‘... consonance, dissonance, melody, texture, elephants, clouds, snowballs, anything, from any time andwhenever it is needed – bound only by the borders of my limited imagination’!

Ayres has won many awards, including the International Gaudeamus Prize for composition in 1994 during the Gaudeamus Music week and the Vermeulen Prize in 2003, the highest award for composition in the Netherlands.

This disc features two of Richard Ayres’ ongoing series of ‘NONcerti’ – a form he has invented which, he explains, is both an ‘un-concerto’ and an ‘uncertain concerto’. Rather than the traditional virtuoso soloist ‘battling’ with an orchestra, he explores ideas of collaboration, failure, imperfection and mortality, but expressed in a riot of melody, quotations and invented sounds.

His works often tell or illustrate a story, as the track-titles show, below: in No. 36 the solo horn player runs up and down ramps as part of its Alpine scenario, while No.37b, although not a NONcerto by name, draws on the same narrative ideas. Based in Ayres’s Cornish-Swiss fantasy world the later stages of the first movement sees the two percussionists try some carpentry, one with a saw, the other with a hammer, as if they are trying to nail the piece together.