Richard Causton
composer
“Causton is among our most imaginative composers, as this sequence of five works [on NMC D192] makes clear. The powerful orchestral diptych of Millennium Scenes has a fierce ‘social criticism’ opening, flaunting declamatory unison strings, screeching piccolos and clubby thuds.”
Paul Driver, No.1 in Contemporary section, 100 Best Records of the Year, The Sunday Times
…a magnificently sweeping sequence of declamatory power and lyrical intimacy.
The Guardian
This pairing of Causton’s most recent orchestral statement with his settings of Salvatore Quasimodo makes for a provocative as well as an engrossing juxtoposition.
Gramophone
Sakari Oramo at the head of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, meticulous with the different expressive planes of the orchestra, interprets this work, which invites you to enter a world of wonderful sonorities that, despite the perception that time escapes, they move the soul of those who listen to it.
Sonograma Magazine
Richard Causton
composer
BIOGRAPHY
Richard Causton was born in 1971 in Whitechapel, east London. He first came to prominence as a composer at the age of 24 with The Persistence of Memory, which was premièred at London’s South Bank Centre by the London Sinfonietta under the direction of Oliver Knussen. The title comes from Salvador Dali’s famous ‘melting clocks’ painting and its sense of distorted time also derives from a personal experience dating back to 1989, when Causton became ill and delirious on a visit to southern India. At times the sound-world of this music seems almost electronic – a result of the combined sonorities of a prepared piano, harp, vibraphone and a microtonally tuned set of bells that Causton built especially for the piece.
In the wake of this piece came commissions from the Nash Ensemble (Notturno and Rituals of Hunting and Blooding) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Millennium Scenes). In approaching writing for large orchestra, Causton found his music coalescing into on the one hand extreme delicacy and pathos and on the other, an ebullient sense of joy that turns into something visceral and altogether more menacing. Millennium Scenes also has an avowedly political dimension, which Causton says “came from a need to observe life in the final years of the millennium with unflinching honesty” and is apparent not least in the music’s use of instruments commonly associated with street demonstrations, such as car horns and whistles. After its first performance, The Guardian’s Tim Ashley wrote: “Millennium Scenes is a bold, terminal work, which conveys the atmosphere of the fin de siècle before casting off the current century…The score presents us with a street party on the edge of catastrophe. The first movement conveys riotous clamour as twitchy string recitatives, earsplitting woodwind screeches and vainglorious brass band music are wedged together in confusion. The second section…is a nocturne that crumbles into a nightmare: liquid oboe phrases and a chorale of great beauty hint at a timeless spiritual experience, their progress disrupted, then halted by the return of the raucous opening material. The unnerving ending consists of a brass discord that sounds like countless cars honking at midnight on New Year’s Eve, as well as an apocalyptic fanfare that heralds worse to follow…Orchestrally, it’s virtuoso stuff and was given the superlative performance it deserved by the BBCSO under Sir Andrew Davis.” Millennium Scenes was premièred at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1999 and, in its revised version of 2001, has been received with tremendous enthusiasm on further performances in Switzerland and Germany. A recording can be heard on the NMC label (NMC D192).
The years 2004-2007 brought two works commissioned as memorials. Between Two Waves of the Sea was written for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and involves the live performers in a duet with especially composed music which was pre-recorded by the same orchestra and reproduced in concert via a sampler: a ‘virtual’ orchestra which is physically absent but heard (or half-heard) as if from the next room. Phoenix (for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello) was commissioned for the London Sinfonietta and its starting point was the fact that the piano is the only instrument in the group whose notes fade as soon as they are sounded. Causton says “I had been thinking about the Italian artist Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which is a kind of attempt to depict movement in sculpture. I was intrigued by the relationship between the impossibility of making sculpture move and the impossibility of making the piano sound endure. Of course a series of dots (if close enough to one another) can be made to resemble a line and this is similar to how Boccioni’s sculpture creates the illusion of movement – like the sort of blurred ‘smear’ that you can get in photography by holding the shutter open too long on a camera. And there’s a poetic parallel between this trying to make something endure which can’t (the piano sound) and…hoping to evade death through rebirth”. Phoenix was the winner of a 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society Award and a recording is available on the London Sinfonietta label (Jerwood Series 4, SINF CD1-2008).
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In 2009 Causton received an intriguing commission from the City of London Festival’s Ian Ritchie to produce a work for Chopin’s bicentenary. The new work was a collaboration with artist Luke Jerram and the result, Nocturne for 21 Pianos, was first performed on midsummer’s night the following year. Reviewing the event for The Times, Richard Morrison wrote: “As night fell on the longest day we crowded round a circle of 21 upright pianos, each with two flaming torches on it. The spectacle, outdoors in the heart of the Square Mile, was delightfully incongruous. But then the music started and the real magic began….the composer Richard Causton had taken [Chopin’s] 21 Nocturnes and arranged them – in a mishmash of fragments, overlaps and free fantasias – for 21 pianos…The sound was eerie, ethereal and enchanting. Sometimes one pianist was given a whole nocturne. But more often Chopin’s music triggered a surreal wash of arpeggios and scales that rippled round the circle. That the 21 honky-tonks were slightly out of tune and time with each other added to the bizarre charm. In places it sounded like a symphony for ice-cream vans. [It was] a highlight of the Festival’s first evening.”
Causton revisited the combination of pre-recorded music with live music in his Chamber Symphony (2009, rev. 2010). Commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under its Sound Investment scheme, this piece was subsequently performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall and received its US première last November at the Lincoln Center in New York. The Chamber Symphony reflects Causton’s ongoing preoccupation with the poetry and imagery of William Blake, whose work attracts him for its combination of exalted, psychedelic fantasy with a social awareness and compassion way ahead of its time.
These ideas also feed directly into Causton’s work for large orchestra, Twenty-Seven Heavens, which was commissioned by the European Union Youth Orchestra as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and premièred at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw under the direction of Gianandrea Noseda. Reviewing the work at its UK première, The Daily Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett wrote: “The real discovery was Richard Causton’s Twenty-Seven Heavens, [which was] as sharply outlined and brilliantly coloured as a stained-glass window […] Causton’s piece began with a beautifully vivid metaphor of heavenly order and radiance, with two solo violins locked in an eternal embrace. Then sullen gravity intervened, pulling the music down to earth in beautifully-imagined episodes for low brass and percussion. One could feel the music trying to “slip the surly bonds of earth” – which it eventually did, in a way that was thrilling and subtly poetic”.
A more recent orchestral work, Ik zeg: NU (I say: NOW), received its first performance in January 2019 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sakari Oramo. Causton writes that the work “is named after a book by my Dutch relative, Sal van Son. The piece is partly about the passage of time: the ‘now’ becomes the past from the moment it has been named. But it is also a homage to my 98-year-old relative, whose book traces the history of his Jewish family through four centuries, including his own years in hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland during the Second World War”.
Causton’s current works includes a project at IRCAM as holder of a 2022-2023 Artistic Research Residency to develop techniques for playing the piano using electromagnets suspended over the strings: an audio signal is sent to the electromagnets, causing the strings to vibrate in response. The current Residency (undertaken with composer Per Bloland, who originally developed the Electro-Magnetically-Prepared Piano in 2013) is focussing on the addition of an active control feedback system, designed to vastly increase the sonic palate and offer the user a much greater degree of timbral control. This research will result in two new works; one for solo piano and another for small ensemble.
He is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Patron of the Centre for Young Musicians.
September 2026
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Richard Causton
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Ik Zeg: NU
‘De tijd schrijdt voort, staat nooit stil. Mijn tienjarig achterneefje Joppe Naftaniel merkte filosofisch op: “Ik zeg nú nu en even later is het al geschiedenis” ‘ (Time strides forwards; it never stands still. My ten-year-old great nephew Joppe Naftaniel remarked philosophically “I say now now, and a moment later it is already history’”) writes Salomon van Son, a Dutch relative of mine, in the foreword to his book Ik Zeg Nu, Nu. Sal is now a remarkably youthful nonagenarian, and his book traces the history of his Jewish family over a period of 430 years. Towards the end it contains a harrowing account of his own survival in hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Second World War.
My piece doesn’t seek to illustrate these events, and it does not offer a narrative. Instead it reflects upon the title of Sal’s book, with its juxtaposition of childlike directness, innocence and profundity. This also seemed to be a metaphor for how we experience not only music, but the passing of life itself: nothing remains the same and we can never grasp the present, never hold onto it. It is always slipping through our fingers.
Ik Zeg: NU is made up of two contrasting ideas which run throughout the piece. On the one hand, there is extremely fast music played by a hyperactive, zany ‘menagerie’ of instrumental trios; a kind of weightless music. On the other, there are extremely slow, repetitive patterns which shift almost imperceptibly over long stretches of time. Whilst the gravity of this demands a slow pace of listening, the light, whimsical music delights playfully in the moment, darting around too rapidly and too busily to grasp properly. In their different ways, both materials play on the elusiveness of the ‘now’, and in their interaction, the ear is pulled in different directions.
Ik Zeg: NU is dedicated to Sal van Son, aged 98 – and to my son, aged 4.
for orchestra
2019 20 minutes
Instrumentation: 3(1,2,3=picc.).3(3=C.A.).3.3(3=CBsn). – 4.3.3.1 – timp. – 5perc. – hp. – acc. – pno. – 16.14.12.10.8
First performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo on 23rd January 2019 at the Barbican Hall, London.
Commissioned by BBC Radio 3
Commended at the 2019 International Rostrum of Composers and broadcast in twenty-seven countries.
La Terra Impareggiabile
Includes:
La terra impareggiabile
Ik zeg: NU
NMC D273
NMC Recordings
Marcus Farnsworth, Huw Watkins, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo
La Terra Impareggiabile
Marcus Farnsworth, Huw Watkins, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo
…a magnificently sweeping sequence of declamatory power and lyrical intimacy.
The Guardian
This pairing of Causton’s most recent orchestral statement with his settings of Salvatore Quasimodo makes for a provocative as well as an engrossing juxtoposition.
Gramophone
It’s about time. Not just the wait since Richard Causton’s previous NMC recording, but the typically atypical explorations of temporality in these two substantial works.
BBC Music Magazine
Writ large or in the intimacy of song, Causton’s music is imaginatively written in an attractive idiom. La Terra Impareggiabile is one of our favorite recordings of 2022.
Sequenza21
La terra impareggiabile (‘The Incomparable Earth’) is a magnificent cycle…recorded here by Marcus Farnsworth and Huw Watkins in a performance of alternately gripping power and constrained sensitivity…has enchanted my ear more with each hearing. Terrific.
Gramophone
Sakari Oramo at the head of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, meticulous with the different expressive planes of the orchestra, interprets this work, which invites you to enter a world of wonderful sonorities that, despite the perception that time escapes, they move the soul of those who listen to it.
Sonograma Magazine
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