This is a plug.

Having heard all the music on this programme I think it's quite an interesting one. The improvisation by Elliott Sharp (guitar) and Christian Marclay (turntables) is an intricate and beautiful thing, as is Chris Burn's transcription for harp. violin and cello of a Derek Bailey solo guitar improvisation (no, really, it sounds like a silly idea but the music is quite something). John Oswald's "arrangement" of Tchaikovsky consists of the orchestra part of the last movement of the Tchaik violin concert, with the solo part replaced by an improvisation by Jon Rose (who obviously knows the piece very well, as all violinists do, and could probably play it if he put his mind to it), which no doubt many will find stupid if not sacrilegious. I thought it was good fun, the kind of thing one might joke about doing but never actually get around to, though I don't think I need to listen to it again very soon.

I can say something! Sarah Nicolls is a very fine contemporary pianist, I look forward2hearing the progamme.

Thanks Richard.
I'm assuming that work on Blattwerk (I mention this in particular because you've written about it) informed the way in which the piece developed, or at least the interface between performer and electronics. Is this a fair assumption? Or is that a bit like asking a pianist if the the Bach fugue that they played last week informed their overall performance practice?
I should probably just sit on my hands and wait to hear the piece before asking any more unformed questions...

Yes. The "seeded improvisation" idea started actually in a tentative kind of way in the fourth part of transmission (and its expansion for ensemble in DARK MATTER), became much more important in Blattwerk and is the overall basis of adrift.
The "fixed" element is a soundfile which is based on a recording (by Sarah) of the original piano piece, which is transformed in various ways: by pitch shifting and time compression/expansion (independently, but both increasingly), in timbre (also to an increasing extent as it goes on) and in the order of its constituent segments (becoming more "out of order" and then less so again). The soundfile can be started and paused at will, like the pianist's playing of the score. The improvisational material which I interpolate between fragments of the soundfile (and occasionally simultaneously with it) is mostly based on samples of the same soundfile but also partly on other piano sounds (especially from inside the piano). The "score", additional to the notated piano part, consists of a couple of pages outlining the basic criteria for a performance and describing how these were interpreted in its initial realisations. So yes, it is intended to be portable, and specifies nothing about what hard- or software would be used for the electronic part, one reason being of course that almost every electronic performer's "instrument" is different, and is conceived according to the performer's individual priorities, and in any case changes over time as technological developments take place or become affordable.

The wider issue here is quite interesting I think - how to define what a realisation of a particular composition actually consists of, without specifying how that realisation is to be carried out, so as to leave space for other people and other times. I think it's more interesting when dealing with electronics to emphasise the view of a composition as initiating a process, as opposed to creating an "object" (although there are always elements of both of course).

Any more details?

All I know so far is that the concert will be in the Pavilion. I'll post more as soon as I have it.