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REVIEWS

BBC Proms World Premiere for Morgan Hayes
Royal Albert Hall, Thursday 25 August 2005, 7.30pm
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BBC Proms World Premiere BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joseph Swensen Royal Albert Hall, Thursday 25 August 2005, 7.30pm

The commissioned pieces at this year's Proms have thus far been a mixed bag. But Strip, by the 32-year-old British composer Morgan Hayes, heard at last night's BBC Symphony Orchestra Prom, was certainly among the more striking.

Hayes conjured some interesting sounds - splintered pizzicati, twanging cimbalom, chords that melted into licks of melody, the whole glittery mass bound together by the breathy reediness of the harmonium.

But the piece's real fascination was its teasing suggestion that under all the variety lay just one thing, which was never said out loud. It made me want to hear the piece again, there and then.
Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph, 26 August 2005

Finally, last night there was the first performance by the BBC Symphony and Joseph Swensen (filling in on short notice for an indisposed Sir Andrew Davis) of Strip, an orchestral piece by Morgan Hayes, which was a BBC Proms commission. Hayes is 32 years old, a former student of Michael Finnissy, Simon Bainbridge, and Robert Saxton. He's a composer I had heard a lot about (good stuff), but I had not before now heard any of his music. It's in a modernistic, not especially tonal style. Strip begins with a grid of non-tuned percussion music, over which is eventually suspended dissonant longish chords.

Eventually the percussion rhythms migrate into bass instruments and acquire pitches, and intense and active melodic lines flower, most memorably for two solo violins for a while. The building up of all that is really pretty impressive … I'd like to hear the piece again, and to hear more of Hayes's music - soon.
Rodney Lister, www.sequenza21.com, 26 August 2005

Sir Andrew Davis was supposed to conduct this Prom, but fell ill at the last moment. I don't suggest that his sickness was feigned. But I can't believe that the prospect of conducting the premiere of Morgan Hayes's Strip would have spurred his recovery. Most young composers have renounced the obscurantism of new music in the 1960s and 1970s. Not Hayes.

The title of his first orchestral work refers to his method of laying strips of instrumental sound over each other, and to what the programme note described as his desire to 'strip down the music and its presentation to the simplest means'. Hmm. If that's the case I would hate to hear one of his denser pieces. Though brief, Strip is impenetrable. Its individual components may be relatively graspable - jagged, intertwining high string lines, weird woodwind arabesques, lurching brass refrains and ever-present plinks from a huge percussion section. But they seem to co-exist rather than mesh into a cogent whole. True, there are punctuation marks: sudden near-silences in the relentless surge. Yet I found it impossible to tell if what came after differed from what went before.
Richard Morrison, The Times, 27 August 2005

Strip, Morgan Hayes's first Proms commission, is also his first work for orchestra. Cutting your orchestral teeth at such a high-profile occasion should be daunting for any composer, but there is no trace of tentativeness in Hayes's intricate and highly wrought piece, which lasts about 12 minutes.

Born in 1973 and a former pupil of Finnissy, Saxton and Bainbridge, Hayes has impeccable modernist credentials, but though his music has a modernist intensity of detail it is neither austere nor abstract. The starting point for Strip was the National Theatre's production of Shakespeare's Pericles, which made a big impression on Hayes. The piece is also studded with allusions to other composers (and previous Proms commissions) that he admires. It makes for an incident-packed musical trip.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 27 August 2005

Strip is the first work for orchestra that Morgan Hayes, still in his early thirties, has written. Its title apparently refers to the layering of the material and to the fact that it is intended to be stripped of everything unnecessary.

Such information might have led those who gathered for its world premiere at last night's Prom, given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Joseph Swensen (replacing a sick Sir Andrew Davis) to expect a fashionably minimalist piece, where space is filled rather than created.

Far from it. Hayes is one of those rare, sacred animals who enjoys modernistic complexity and seeks to express his individuality within that world. His music is all the better for that. Not that Strip, on first hearing, sounded perfectly formed. For about half of its duration Hayes seemed to be groping his way into the medium, slightly bemused by the enormous box of tricks at his command, though perhaps the BBCSO's rather tentative playing had something to do with that feeling. Yet little by little the music began to gel, the composer's confidence - or maybe one's confidence in him - growing with each bar.

Yes, this work did have substance, direction and a sense of destination, and when it ended one was left hungry for more.
Stephen Pettitt, Evening Standard, 26 August 2005