Season of live music begins at De La Warr

A WORLD premier collaboration begins the new season of live music at the De La Warr Pavilion this January.

By Ben Higgins

Prestigious composer and pianist Michael Nyman, known for scoring films such as The Piano and 2008 documentary hit Man On Wire, will join for the first time with soul and jazz singer David McAlmont on January 23. Tickets for the voice and piano event are 10.

The filmic theme continues on February 7, when the Wingates Brass Band, long regarded as one of the top brass bands in Britain, will play music from some of Mr Nyman's films, as well as traditional hits from the brass repertoire.

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Pianist Joanna McGregor opened the London Jazz Festival at the Royal Festival Hall last November, and is now director of the Bath International Music Festival. In the first half of an interesting evening on February 21, she plays straight classical performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations, and a selection of Preludes and Fuges from Book One.

For the second half of the evening she will collaborate with conceptual artist, writer and musician Scanner, to perform an improvised interpretation of the Variations and the Bach Chorales. Scanner, otherwise known as Robin Rimbaud, produced the first ever Tate Modern commission for sound-art, and has collaborated with Brian Ferry, Radiohead and the Royal Ballet. Tickets 15.

On March 3, Matthew Bourne presents Songs From A Lost Piano. This is the last of three shows in which the maverick pianist plays music composed around the off-key sounds produced by six discarded pianos. He searched attics, sheds, parlours, village halls and theatre storerooms for pianos in varying states of disrepair, and became fascinated with the sounds produced from these historical relics. The performance includes a legless piano from a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, and a faded cocktail grand. Tickets are 12.

On March 7 The Michael Nyman Band will perform a live soundtrack Dziga Vertov's classic 1929 silent film Man With A Movie Camera. It was Vertov's formal inventiveness that inspired Nyman to create a new score for this radical experiment of soviet cinema, which depicts a montage of urban Russian life. Tickets are 20 and the film lasts for 68 minutes.

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On March 13 the pianist and raconteur Volker Bertelmann, known as Hauschka, is joined by British pianist John Tilbury. As Hauschka, Bertelmann works with 'prepared' pianos, doctoring the innards of the instrument to produce music with strange overtones. He wedges felt and leather beneath hammers, weaves guitar strings laterally through piano strings and balances corks on alternate notes to create an alternative sound that lies somewhere between Yann Tiersen, Max Richter and Eric Satie.

John Tilbury also has experience with prepared piano. He is perhaps best known for groundbreaking work with free improvisation group AMM. In past performances band members interacted with Tilbury's playing by manipulating the strings of his piano, creating prepared piano music in real time. He will perform music by Farnaby, Howard Skempton, Dave Smith and John White amongst others. Tickets to see the pair are 10.

In the final collaboration of the program, Tunng & Tinariwen play in the auditorium on March 18. Experimental folk band Tunng are noted for their use of strange instruments, including sea shells. They have supported Doves, and their music has been featured in American TV show The OC. They describe themselves as a "twisted folk-pop-rock collective".

They are joined by three members of Tinariwen, a Tuareg band formed in the 1980s by a group of exiled friends. The Tuareg are a nomadic folk occupying the Saharan interior of Northern Africa, and the band name is variously translated as "empty places" and "desert boys". Their songs mostly deal with their people's independence from the Mali government, and Chris Martin cited them as a great influence on Coldplay's latest album, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends. See them in Bexhill for 12.

For all tickets or more information contact the Pavilion Box Office on 01424 229111.