Viva Brighton Issue #46 December 2016

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
.........................................
Bowie deconstructed
Charles Hazlewood, Paraorchestra founder
I first came up with
the idea of forming
The British Paraorchestra
in 2012.
To put it in context,
I have four kids and
my youngest child was
born with cerebral
palsy, so in her short
life she’s given me a
wonderful introduction
to the disabled
community. I started wondering why it was that
in a career spanning more than 20 years conducting
orchestras all over the world, I’d never come
across musicians with disabilities. At this point,
in early 2012, the London Paralympics was fast
approaching, and this set my mind to thinking
how is it that in sport, so much has been done to
promote disabled athletes that people no longer
look at disabled sport and think that it’s some
kind of nice, warm, fuzzy therapy - it’s worldclass
sport, nothing less. So I thought if sport can
do that, music certainly can.
The Paralympics was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
when the eyes of the entire world
would be focused on us. So I formed a new
orchestra, The British Paraorchestra; it’s just like
any other orchestra, except for the fact that the
musicians in it, aside from being at the top of
their game, all have a disability. They made their
debut at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics,
playing standalone, but also alongside
Coldplay, which was a great way to launch the
movement. It’s gone from strength to strength.
Performing ‘A Celebration of David Bowie’
at Glastonbury Festival 2016, as the first ever
classical music headliner was a seminal moment
for us. The main structure of this project
includes my orchestra, The Army of Generals,
who are a crack squad
of amazing virtuoso
musicians, with a
strong number of
Paraorchestra members.
We headlined
The Park stage at
midnight, when all
the other stages are
shut down, and the
whole of Glastonbury
descended to watch
this incredible celebration of David Bowie, reexpressed
and re-imagined by Philip Glass.
Anyone who loves Bowie will know that he
wrote two really great albums during his
so-called ‘Berlin years’, Low and Heroes.
They are highly electronic and meditative. They
completely re-wrote the rule book on what pop
records should or might be, and they’re really
progressive pieces of work. What Glass does is to
take some of the important themes, melodic fragments,
chord progressions, and textures from the
two iconic albums, and to rework them through
his own particular mill, so it’s a bit like looking
at Bowie through a Philip Glass-shaped prism.
These symphonies sound absolutely like Glass,
not Bowie, and yet there’s the half-remembered,
shadowy ghosts of ideas and a familiarity that
chimes. It’s trademark Glass; pulsing, meditative,
hypnotic, and it loops around and around, attracting
more foreign bodies as it moves forward.
It’s really insistent, very intense, and all filtered
through this incredible, kaleidoscopic colour
prism, the orchestra.
As told to Julia Zaltzman
The British Paraorchestra & Friends present A
Celebration of David Bowie. Philip Glass: Heroes
Symphony/Low Symphony at De La Warr Pavilion,
Bexhill, Wednesday 14th, 7pm £26.50
Photo by Lily Holman
....53....