CMC Biography
The Chamber Music Company, founded by Mark Troop in 1986, has made its name as one of the most innovative and imaginative groups in the UK. Initially a piano trio plus singer Patricia Rozario, CMC is both vocal and instrumental, adding not only different instrumentalists where appropriate, but in seeking new performance styles for classical music.
CMC gives straight classical concerts but also music theatre & cabaret, discovers both Old and New music, fuses ethnic and classical. We have explored Tango in terms of modern Argentine music and charted parallels between war-torn Mexico and Northern Ireland. Much of our recent work has been contemporary, framed by imaginative excursions into the past and sideways into other cultures – Second Glance (New Music), The Latin American Roadshow (a multi-genre celebration), The CMC Rare Music Series (rediscovery), and Deconstructing The Trout (updating tradition).
CMC believes that standard and contemporary repertoire are part of the same living tradition, and that both have their future within the overall perspective of world music traditions. CMC draws connections between disparate music styles, integrating them into coherent performance. We are passionate about new music and aim to commission repertoire, not premieres.
The result has been a stream of programmes encompassing new music, rediscovered works in the vocal and instrumental repertoire, new forms of concert giving and specially created education projects. The group has recorded for Radio 3, taken British education projects all over the world with the British Council, run its own London Festivals and invites venues all over the country to share in the excitement of classical repertoire seen in a new light.
For the first ten years CMC explored the traditional classical repertoire with a sense of adventure. This included mixing chamber music with vocal — relatively rare at the time — rediscovering neglected masterworks, and feeding new music into programmes in a manner both appropriate and accessible. This led to the groundbreaking festival in London, the CMC Summer Solstice, in which classical and contemporary styles were set alongside jazz and gypsy bands, for an evening of music that created for The Guardian “The Ronnie Scott’s of Classical Music”.
In 2001 CMC commissioned a music theatre work of chamber music proportions designed for smaller venues without the resources to promote opera. CMC sees a future in small-scale music theatre that combines the intimacy of chamber music with the excitement of opera. Matins for the Virgin of Guadalupe by Stephen McNeff was premiered at the Dartington International Summer School and at Battersea Arts Centre’s Sharp Intake of Music Festival. It continues in CMC’s repertory and was part of the 2004 Cheltenham International Festival.
For BBC Radio 3 Mark Troop and Mike Gonzalez (senior lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Glasgow University) devised a special Latin American series of programmes reflecting the focus of CMC’s work in that repertoire. Called Twilight of the Iguana, and with a script created from Latin American fiction and poetry, it was a visionary history of Latin America and its cultural European forebears.
CMC has developed a special relationship with the New Music Indaba in South Africa, sharing music, work and educational ideas.
Current work:
CMC Classics – Schubert and Brahms (touring)
CMC Rare Music – touring Volkmann
Inspired By China – film, dance & music – London 2010 & touring
Second Glance 3 – the second performance new music festival – autumn 10
In preparation: the third Latin American Road Show (combining classical and folk idioms, dance, poetry, puppetry and music)
Rare Music Series Concert 3 – Ignaz Friedman Quintet
Deconstructing The Trout: a visionary reinterpretation of traditional repertory (Two new quintets, four new Trout variations by four composers and three newly commissioned sections to fit between the movements)
