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Fika Duo & Laila Arafah

26 September @ 12:45 pm 1:45 pm

£7 Adults

Tickets on the door (cash or card). Under 18s and carers go free

Doors open at 12:15 pm

Aylesbury Lunchtime Music

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St Mary the Virgin

Church Street
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire HP20 2JJ United Kingdom
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Fika Duo & Laila Arafah

Performers

Emma Loerstad

Flute

Zoë Meadowcroft

Guitar

Laila Arafah

Composer

Notes on the performers

The Fika Duo was formed in 2023 by Emma and Zoë, both first year undergraduates studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London. They have played a wide range of repertoire in particular focusing on popular music styles from South America. During their time at the Academy they hope to explore new genres and styles of music, and expand the existing repertoire with commissions and arrangements.

The duo’s name comes from the Swedish ‘fika’, a break spent with friends and family over a cup of coffee and cinnamon bun, regularly enjoyed by Emma and Zoë after concerts and rehearsals.

Laila Arafah is a London based composer whose works centre on interdisciplinarity, intimacy, temporality, decay, and self-guided explorations of unstable sonic objects.

Recent commissions have come from London Symphony Orchestra, Explore Ensemble, Aldeburgh Festival, Purcell Symphony Orchestra, and Westminster Abbey’s Commonwealth Service. Laila’s piece ‘CONCRETE’ for soloists and 70+ phones was published in a book on Pauline Oliveros, and as the youngest appointment in the LSO Panufnik Scheme’s history, she’s received numerous accolades and residencies. She has also written for members of London Sinfonietta, Carducci Quartet, London Mozart Players, Roadrunner Trio, Quatuor Bozzini, CoMA Orchestra, Talea Ensemble and others.

Programme

Programme notes

Astor Piazzolla (arr. Zoë Meadowcroft)

Buenos Aires Spring

Astor Piazzolla was the composer who revolutionised the traditional tango to incorporate elements of classical and jazz music to create a whole new style, called ‘nuevo tango’. His suite ‘Estaciones Porteñas’ (the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) is exemplary of this style, originally written for Piazzolla’s
quintet of bandoneon, violin, electric guitar, piano, and double bass. The movement portraying Spring opens with an energetic burst and sharp rhythms which continue through complex contrapuntal passages to the impassioned middle section, before ending with a playful duet between accordion and double bass.

Source: Fika Duo

Laila Arafah

Fractals

Laila will introduce her piece

Stephen Goss

From honey to ashes
  1. Hot
  2. Milonga
  3. Interlude in a discrete mode
  4. The Hotel Kempinski
  5. Tango brawl
  6. The Ajman

From Honey to Ashes (2007) is a companion piece to The Raw and the Cooked for two guitars (2004). Guitarist Richard Hand and flautist Jennifer Stinton had been performing arrangements of some of the movements from The Raw and the Cooked and they asked me if I’d like to write some new music to make a longer suite for flute and guitar.

The resultant piece is a set of eleven highly contrasting miniatures. The movements range from original compositions (Milonga, Interlude in a discrete mode) to more or less straight arrangements (Flutes and Fiddles). Many of the other pieces make reference to composers, musicians and contrasting styles of music. Brazil is loosely based on Terry Gilliam’s film of the same name and draws on fragments of popular songs from the 1930’s. Hot was written as a tribute Django Reinhardt, The Raw is loosely based on the jazz guitar style of Allan Holdsworth and Malabar Hill is built from snippets of a jazz-rock track by John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. The Hotel Kempinski uses part of a David Byrne groove, Tango Brawl is a homage to Piazzolla, Alba draws on the style of Satie’s Gnossiennes, and The Ajman is infused with Arabic influences.

Tango Brawl (a Piazzolla homage) was originally written for Spin (2002/03), a work for ensemble, dancers, video and electronics (funded by the Arts Council of England), which I wrote in collaboration with composer Tom Armstrong.

Source: Stephen Goss

Heitor Villa-Lobos

Bachianas Brasileras No. 5
  1. Ária

Villa-Lobos (1887 – 1959) was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as “the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music”.

The Bachianas Brasileiras are a series of nine suites written for various combinations of instruments and voices between 1930 and 1945. They represent a fusion of Brazilian folk and popular music on the one hand and the style of Johann Sebastian Bach on the other, as an attempt to freely adapt a number of Baroque harmonic and contrapuntal procedures to Brazilian music. Number 5 is scored for soprano and orchestra of cellos

Source: Wikipedia

Astor Piazzolla

Café 1930

Histoire du Tango attempts to convey the history and evolution of the tango in four movements: Bordel 1900, Café 1930, Nightclub 1960, and Concert d’aujourd’hui. Café 1930 is another age of the tango. People stopped dancing it as they did in 1900, preferring instead simply to listen to it. It became more musical, and more romantic. This tango has undergone total transformation: the movements are slower, with new and often melancholy harmonies. Tango orchestras come to consist of two violins, two concertinas, a piano, and a bass. The tango is sometimes sung as well.

Source: Wikipedia

Máximo Diego Pujol

Suite Buenos Aires
  1. Pompeya
  2. Palermo
  3. San Telmo
  4. Microcentro

Born in 1957, Máximo Diego Pujol is an Argentine classical guitarist and composer.

Source: Wikipedia