Reviews

Goldsmiths Chamber Ensemble, Purcell Room
Richard Morrison, The Times excerpt
24 November 1986

The University of London's 150th year was celebrated here with a refreshing parade of the here-and-now, rather than a veneration of ancient glories. Every note in this concert was penned in the last decade, and all by composers commissioned at some time by the music department of Goldsmiths College.

The preparation and expertise of the dozen players in the Goldsmiths Chamber Ensemble, under Edward Gregson's direction, was exemplary throughout the evening.

They closed with Gary Carpenter's exuberant musical diary of his two years in Germany, Die Flimmerkiste ("The Magic Lantern" - also, apparently, the name of an interesting bar in Krefeld). A surrealist procession of, if my arithmetic is correct, 67 miniature movements, it dazzled with its pungent pithiness.

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