So during my summer and continuing on to this beautiful autumn I have been visiting Baku monthly in the quest - along with Malcolm Newton & Marc Tritschler - to find suitable music to fit our wonderful Creative Content for both the Opening Ceremony and Closing Ceremony for the Fourth Islamic Solidarity Games which are in Baku next May. I posted much earlier in the year - May 31st 'When Two Worlds Collide' & July 4th 'Weird & Trying to find the Wonderful' - how diverse this project is and now a few months further on I can safely report that we are very happy with our choice of music for a great deal of the Ceremonies.
In January 2017 I will be working with the brilliant Steve Price at Abbey Road Studios where we will be recording the vast majority of the music. I have the pleasure of working in both Studio 1 & Studio 2 over the course of two weeks conducting The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. 75 piece in Studio 1 and 30 piece in Studio 2.
We have discovered on our journey a wealth of absolutely amazing music by composers such as:
Fikret Amirov, Kara Karayev, Arif Melikov and Niyazi. All of whom are composers whose music we should know but don't here in the UK.
Right now our lead Orchestrator, the brilliant Jennifer Green, is heavily scribing away getting the scores and parts ready for us - a mammoth task as we have around 120 minutes of music to record!