Borealis 2011

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Laurence Crane

Laurence Crane was born in Oxford in 1961 and studied composition with Peter Nelson and Nigel Osborne at Nottingham University. He lives and works in London.  His music is mainly written for the concert hall, although his list of works includes pieces initially composed for film, radio, theatre, dance and installation.

He is closely associated with the British ensemble Apartment House, who have given numerous performances of his work since their formation in 1995. He has composed two pieces especially for the ensemble; Riis and John White in Berlin , the latter commissioned in 2003 by the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin. His output includes solo works written for some of the regular personnel of Apartment House, including Bobby J for guitarist Alan Thomas, Sparling for clarinettist Andrew Sparling and Raimondas Rumsas for cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, who is the founder and director of the ensemble. Apartment House have presented two portrait concerts of Crane's work; in October 1998 at the Three Two Festival in New York City and in October 2001 at The Warehouse in London as part of the BMIC's Cutting Edge series, a concert that was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 3's weekly new music programme Hear and Now.

Other ensembles from the UK who have performed Crane's work include Ixion, Lontano, Radius, Noszferatu, Plus-Minus Ensemble and the London Sinfonietta, as well as Continuum Ensemble (Toronto), Bradyworks (Montreal), Ensemble Offspring (Sydney) and 175 East (Auckland), who have broadcast a number of works on Concert FM in New Zealand. The Canadian new music group Ensemble Kore gave a concert of his work in Montreal in September 2005. In 2006 he was commissioned by the Zaterdag Matinee concert series to write West Sussex Folk Material for the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra/Thierry Fischer. This work was given its première in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in December 2006 in a concert that was broadcast live on Dutch Radio.  He has been commissioned twice to write for the Ives Ensemble in The Netherlands; in 2003 he composed Movement for 10 Musicians , for a collaboration with Rotterdam Dance Works, and in 2007 Chamber Symphony, which the Ives Ensemble premièred in November of that year. Other ensembles in The Netherlands who have commissioned work from Crane are Orkest de Ereprijs and Orkest de Volharding.