Augusta Read Thomas: The Auditions

This release is dominated by three major scores with four shorter works filling out this 80-minute sonic portrait of an inexhaustibly inventive and individual composer. The ballet score The Auditions was written for the Martha Graham Dance Company, and with it, Thomas joins a distinguished company of composers who wrote scores for this seminal figure in modern dance (Copland, Menotti, Barber, Schuman and Hindemith amongst many others). It is structured in 7 sections, with the even numbered auditions of the title being the action-packed sections (all titled ‘The Room’), and the odd-numbered ones (all titled ‘The Landscape’) acting as slower, more otherworldly frames. Premiered in New York in November 2019 this work is now programmed by five dance companies and Martha Graham will be touring the work in 2020 using this recording. The Auditions is published by Nimbus NMP1102 Conductors score and hire parts available. The Auditions can be performed with a synchronisation licence with this recording.

Reviews

BBC Music Magazine Christmas 2020

“Augusta Read Thomas has an intense ‘voice’, with an exceptional ear for timbral detail, clarity and the control of ebb and flow…[The Auditions is] tremendously compelling, full of rhythmic sparkle, subtle shades of mood and a brilliant sense of interplay between the intriguing selection of instruments…Perhaps the vocal works are ultimately the most touching. – 5 out of 5 stars (Performance) / 4 out of 5 stars (Recording)

Gramophone Magazine December 2020

“Practicable virtuosity is evident in Avian Capriccio…Timbral scintillation, long a facet of Thomas’s armoury, comes to the fore in The Auditions…As usual in this series, performances leave nothing to chance. Fortunate is the composer who has such committed exponents; but then, fortunate the artists who have music so idiomatically conceived and impressively realised.