Explore Ensemble: ‘Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is intertwined with our own development and growth as a group’

The young group, who “work at the radical frontiers of new music”, will give two new works by Joanna Baillie and Oliver Leith their world premieres, in a programme that also includes Lawrence Dunn’s Sentimental Drifting Music. Next Friday’s concert will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.

“Really Huddersfield is intertwined with our own development and growth as a group,” explains co-founder and artistic adviser Nicholas Moroz.

“We were doing concerts at the Royal College for a few years, and a few outside the college which were our first professional engagements, but I think the shot in the arm for us was playing at the Shorts Programme in 2016.

“The director Graham McKenzie took a shine to us and invited us back for the following year where we gave a full programme with new pieces and that was a huge opportunity and launchpad for us.

“Graham has been really supportive in putting me in contact with festivals in Europe. This autumn we were supposed to be in Belgium and the Netherlands with a small tour that was meant to be taken then back to Huddersfield, but sadly the tour has been postponed.”

For Moroz, who is also a composer, what makes Huddersfield special is that “it feels like the only place in the UK that’s actually tied into the wider, vibrant contemporary music scene in Europe.”

“It feels far more European in the diversity of music on offer, and the audiences as well, compared to some of the more established venues and organisations in London who I feel are comparatively more conservative or on the safe side.There are a few exceptions – the London Contemporary Music Festival is also pretty crazy, but in a different way.”

Giving world premieres to Baillie’s Dissolve and Leith’s Hollywood to just a radio audience will be “unusual”, Moroz accepts. “The other weird thing is that the piece by Joana Baillie is for ensemble and video, and the video is actually an integral part of the piece, but she has said as a one-off it’s fine, she’s making a special radio version. The three parts of her piece will be preceded by short descriptions of the video part by some of the players of the ensemble. It’s going to be unusual but it’s taken on a really special significance now.”

Moroz also points out that the ensemble was “lucky” that it received money from the Arts Council’s emergency relief fund to perform the two premieres. “We’ve also doing some recording work funded by the Arts Council,” he says.

Founded in 1978, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has over the years attracted such avant garde musicians and composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Eno, Terry Riley and John Cage.

This year’s programme runs from Friday November 20 to Sunday November 22. For full details visit hcmf.co.uk