Philip Venables

A composer of ferocious dramatic instincts
— Alex Ross

Filters: All / Opera & Music Theatre / Orchestra & Ensemble / Solo & Chamber / Vocal / Installation

  • 4.48 Psychosis

    Duration: 90 minutes. For six singers (3 Soprano 3 Mezzo-soprano) and 12 instrumentalists with sound and video. An award-winning 90-minute chamber opera based on Sarah Kane’s searing final play of the same name, first produced by the Royal Opera Covent Garden

  • Alice

    Duration: 4 minutes. For Tenor (F#–A) and Piano. A short dramatic song in which a gay man reminisces about visiting his Grandmother in hospital.

  • Answer Machine Tape, 1987

    Duration: 45 minutes. For solo piano with sound and live video using a MIDI KeyScanner on the piano. A multimedia piece based on the weeks around the death of artist Peter Hujar in 1987 from AIDS-related illness, as told through the answerphone messages left for fellow artist David Wojnarowicz.

  • Arc

    Duration: 10 minutes. For symphony orchestra (triple wind). A fast and dynamic concert-opener.

  • Bound to Hurt

    Duration: 75 minutes. For female voice and quintet (flute, clarinet, harp, percussion, piano, viola). A chamber music theatre piece that reflects on pop songs about domestic violence, devised with artist Douglas Gordon, singer Ruth Rosenfeld, dramaturg Laura Berman and Ensemble Adapter.

  • Denis & Katya

    Duration: 65 minutes. For Mezzo-soprano, Baritone, four cellists, sound and video. An award-winning chamber opera with text by Ted Huffman based on a tragic true story about two Russian runaway teenagers, examining at the internet culture of voyeurism and trolling.

  • Fight music

    Duration: 5 minutes. For eight players: solo cello + fl, cl, tpt, tbn, pf, drum kit, bass. A smaller version exists for six players (solo cello + fl, cl, pf, perc, vn) A short, aggressive and lively piece about a fight.

  • Flipp

    Duration: 3 minutes. For two saxophones of the same type. A short, virtuosic, rhythmic duet.

  • Illusions (feat. David Hoyle)

    Duration: 14 minutes. For video projection and nine players: picc.bsax / tpt.tbn / pf.1perc(BD.whistle.tgl) / vn.va.cb.   An aggressive, political, in-yer-face piece, featuring performance artist David Hoyle, on the themes of gender, sexuality, democracy, war and revolution.

  • K (prelude to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet)

    Duration 7’30”. For Clarinet Quintet. A meditative prelude to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, in which the string quartet obscures and reveals the first two bars of Mozart’s Quintet, which are finally revealed at the end.

  • Metamorphoses after Britten

    Duration: 8 minutes. Four miniatures for solo oboe, with versions also for clarinet, saxophone or bassoon.

  • My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variations

    Duration: 23 minutes. For solo accordion. In a troubadour fashion, the accordionist plays whilst telling his mother’s lifestory in 12 short chapters, from first crush at school through marriage, children, retirement, being widowed, and attending her son’s accordion concerts where he plays the Goldberg Variations.

  • Naomo Pinnetuo

    Duration: 2 minutes. A fast, virtuosic piece for solo violin, based on a fragment by Naomi Pinnock.

  • numbers 76-80 : tristan and isolde

    Duration: 14 minutes. For four voices (SATB) and string quartet. Words and music, using the poem ‘numbers 76–80: tristan und isolde’ by Simon Howard, in five short movements.

  • numbers 81–85; numbers 96–100

    Duration: 20 minutes total (12 minutes for numbers 81–85; 8 minutes for numbers 96–100. For Mezzo-Soprano (F3–A5), Alto flute, Clarinet, String Trio and optional video projection. Two pieces, one a kind of story, the other a kind of breathing meditation, based on poetry by Simon Howard.

  • numbers 91–95

    Duration 9 minutes. For speaking voice with two tape recorders, flute, woodblock, harp (may be substituted for piano or guitar.) Spoken text and music, based on the poem of the same name by Simon Howard, about politics, disenfrachisement and nostalgia.

  • Piano Studies

    Duration: 17 minutes. A set of five studies for solo piano.

  • The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions

    Duration: 95 minutes. For a multi-skilled ensemble cast of flexible size. A virtuosic and entertaining music theatre piece based on the book of the same name by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta, with text by Ted Huffman. The cabaret- and baroque-influenced show tells fantastic parables that form a kind of political manifesto for a queer future.

  • The Revenge of Miguel Cotto

    Duration: 14 minutes. For two male vocalists, 3 violins, 3 trombones, accordion and two percussion playing punchbags. A storytelling piece based on poems by Steven J Fowler about the real life betrayal and revenge of boxer Miguel Cotto on Antonio Margarito.

  • Venables plays Bach

    Duration: flexible (60-minute loop). A 42-channel looping sound installation with live organ performance (30 minutes). A meditative and dreamlike ‘composition diary’ that was made while composing numbers 96–100, ideal for large resonant spaces like churches, and based on J.S. Bach’s Prelude in D minor BWV940.

  • Venables plays Bartók

    Duration: 31 minutes. For solo violin, recorded stereo sound and symphony orchestra (double wind). A ‘radio drama’ telling the story of Rudolph Botta, a violinist who fled Hungary to England in 1956 as a refugee and became a violin teacher, and for whom the composer played a Bartók folk melody when he was 14.

  • We Are The Lucky Ones

    Duration: 100 minutes. For a cast of eight performers and symphony orchestra (double wind). A song and dance about life and death: an opera that tells the life story of a special post-war generation, based on interviews with 80 people born all across Europe in the 1940s.