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John Harle

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John Harle, born 20 September 1956 in Newcastle upon Tyne is a saxophonist/composer.


Biography

He is known equally for his work as pioneer saxophonist in the concert hall and for his compositions; intermingling the materials of jazz, rock, classical music, electronics and opera.

He is also a conductor, music director and producer, working with artists as diverse as Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Moondog, Ute Lemper and Lesley Garrett.

Harle was originally a clarinetist who spent a tough musical apprenticeship in the Band of the Coldstream Guards. As a student at the Royal College of Music, he would compose variations reworking Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler as 12 tone music for his own amusement. After he graduated with a 100% final mark (only achieved once before, by Nigel Kennedy two years earlier), Harle's eloquent saxophone fronted his own avant-garde cabaret ensemble called the Berliner Band.

It was this aspect of the saxophonist's work that first attracted the attention of Stanley Myers. But in the same period Harle would also still spend evenings at an East-End Jazz club called Peanuts - jamming with unrestrained free-improvising musicians. From roughly 1973 to 1980, his composing methods were driven by a strictly 12-note serial-music system, and by that period's avant-garde, dominated by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

A decade later, he was ready to recognise a different strand of influence on him - American Jazz. His Father had taken him to hear Duke Ellington's band at a Westminster Abbey Sacred Concert in the early 1970's. It was a homage to Ellington that was to be the next significant landmark in Harle's composing and arranging career, The Shadow of the Duke (1992).

When John Harle the saxophonist performed his friend Harrison Birtwistle's sax concerto Panic at the Last Night of the 1995 Proms at the Albert Hall, new opportunities for John Harle the composer soon followed. After work with David Pountney at the Nottingham Playhouse on new songs for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, he embarked on the composition Terror and Magnificence - an extended work joining classical and rock singing (with Sarah Leonard and Elvis Costello), a string quartet, club dance grooves and 14th century French poetry, with his own lyrical sax conversing and improvising with the powerful tenor sax of Andy Sheppard. Soon to follow was the performance at the Albert Hall in the Proms of 1998 of his opera, Angel Magick. With a libretto by its director, David Pountney, its subject was the alchemist and magician of the Elizabethan court, John Dee. Its critical reception is now legendary - from the ecstatic to the outraged.

Since that time, Harle has undertaken a schedule of concert appearances as an interpreter of the work of others, and from his own compositional projects. He has been co-producer, arranger and musical associate with Sir Paul McCartney on a number of projects including Shadow Cycle, Standing Stone and Ecce cor Meum.

He is perhaps best known for his atmospheric score for Simon Schama's BBC TV series A History of Britain, for the score for Silent Witness, and perhaps also for a variety of TV advertising campaigns for Nissan (Flying was nominated for 'Best Original Music' at the UK Advertising Awards, and its Nissan Dorma remix reached No.6 in the UK Dance Charts), as well as music for Sony, Vauxhall and many others.

His career also embraces the creation of 35 concert works and over 40 film and television scores; solo recordings of concerti by Debussy, Villa-Lobos and Glazunov (which have sold over 200,000 copies to date), plus interpretations of over 25 concerti. The latter includes works by Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars and Bean Rows and Blues Shots by Mike Westbrook.

Harle received a joint accolade with film composer Stanley Myers (Best Artistic Achievement in a Feature Film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988, for the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears). His recordings of his original compositions Terror and Magnificence (with Elvis Costello, Sarah Leonard and saxophonist Andy Sheppard) and Silencium have both spent several weeks with the front-runners in the UK Crossover album charts, and received a Grammy nomination.

Harle has also won a Royal Television Society award (RTS) for his theme to BBC 1's Silent Witness, and received nominations for Defense of the Realm and Summer in the Suburbs. In 1998 he was a castaway on Sue Lawley's Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.

Career highlights

1988 - joint winner of Best Artistic Achievement in a Feature Film Award at Cannes for Prick Up Your Ears. 1995 - gave premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic at the Last Night of the Proms. 1996 - release of Terror and Magnificence, album with Elvis Costello. 1998 - Angel Magick commissioned by the BBC for the Proms. 1998 - Royal Television Society Award for best TV theme music for Silent Witness. 2002 - premiered his own saxophone concerto The Little Death Machine at the BBC Proms.

Key works

  • Foursquare (1980; saxophone quartet)
  • The Golden Demon (1995; saxophone, brass ensemble)
  • Angel Magick (1997; opera)
  • Silencium Suite (1998; two sopranos, saxophone, orchestra)
  • The Little Death Machine (2002; saxophone, orchestra)
  • The Ballad of Jamie Allan (2004; chamber opera)


Selected recordings