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Alex Hills

@hills_alex

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Likes food and wine (very much) but actually a musician (composer).

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Having returned to Thoreau from #ives #concordsonata after most of 30 years recently, in a kind of mid-life crisis kinda way thought I had better learn the rest of it (it is HUGE and absurdly full of notes and invention and wonders). I haven’t done anything like this for awhile and have been taking it so seriously I’ve even put an embargo on buying any new wine until I could play these two very wild indeed pages from #emerson (the first movement). While far from immaculate - which I’m not sure is really the point with Ives anyway, but this certainly has a way to go still - I’m very pleased to say that wine merchants everywhere can begin to breathe again. by @hills_alex

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17 days ago

I love this painting- anon C17th English, the #cholmondeleyladies - it doesn’t have so much to do with my post, but go read it anyway! by @hills_alex

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2 months ago

Sometimes I think music doesn’t do much mirror emotion itself, but the thought processes that go along with emotion. Here, #cpebach doing distraction in the f sharp minor fantasia (#empfindungen ) and #ives doing contemplation in #thoreau from the#concordsonata. Apologies for the particularly terrible sound in the latter ( iPhone and lots pedal an awful combination). The whole Ives sonata may be awhile (a lifetime) away but these heading for little concerts before long I hope… by @hills_alex

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2 months ago

My annual weekend with my experimental music class. Here, along with Anthony Braxton’s (compelling) bid for the pipe-smoker of the year calendar, is a little of @sarahhennies Growing Block and @milker_corporation ‘s Zusammen I - the latter including dancing bith drunken and awkward. As always, a fantastic experience working with these amazing musicians and any audience on Fri night would be most welcome…. by @hills_alex

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3 months ago

Barcelona and Madrid, food and wine version, also with lots of lovely Catalan brown colours....1&2 Mum with morels, and a whole grilled Scorpion fish, @restaurantgresca - nice, informal but not too loud, vibe, busy, successful, restaurant with a good wine list. Food was a little over-reliant on dark, buttery chicken stock sauces for my liking (or soy with the fish) but still very tasty.3&4 fabulous seafood rice and easily the wine of the trip (2021 #bernadeau Les ongles ) @alkostat - high technique versions of traditional Catalan dishes. The seafood ones (kotoxas and a gurnard suquet as well as the rice) the standouts. Wine list quite astonishing in both breadth and reasonableness. My first Bernaudeau (how did that happen) - fabulous balance, lightness, lovely hint of reduction but not too much. Maybe a bit normie compared to the Shi Ro I was drinking in Berlin but I don’t mind that. 5-9 overall the best food meal of the trip - @elsrmartinrest in Madrid. Perfect Motril prawn carpaccio and a 1.2kg grilled red bream (besugo). I loved the presentation of the non-filet bits of this fish, with a little map on the plate. The throat (cochas/kotoxas) tiny but removed completely intact. Not complex food on the surface but perfect ingredients perfectly handled.10&11 Jura - the first of which is an exceedingly recherché Gamay from Lydia Houllion, 400 bottle production - @gotawine Neither of these normie at all - the Chatillon VJ one of the lightest, if slightly volatile, examples I’ve had. Their policy of opening rare bottles for small, reasonably priced, pours, on a Sunday afternoon makes Sunday afternoons in Madrid seem like a good idea. 12 - me in the bar @casa_alberto_1827 , a veeeery traditional place to drink vermut and eat some offal. But more importantly for me, on the spot where Cervantes lived in the 1610s and wrote the end of Don Quixote.Overall thoughts: so many great ingredients, great wine lists. Hilariously cheaper than London. Also a big cheer to the unpictured @bar.manifest in Barcelona, which is actually the place I would be most likely to go back to again and again if it was nearer by. by @hills_alex

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3 months ago

Barcelona and Madrid, art version, with lots of lovely Catalan brown colours….1&2 obligatory Sagrada Familia Pictures. It is an amazing place to visit but I’m not sure what to make of it really, there is something a bit oppressive about some of the materials and how crowded it all is, and a heavy handed ness about the theology and symbolism that I don’t get in older religious buildings.3 Genuinely creepy #tonyoursler -Flamenco Figure’ @macba_barcelona the projected head making various dejected utterances…4&5 @museutapies - this is a beautiful small museum. Arte povera even runs to socks..6&7 Miro and Calder @fundaciomiro . The Calder, very much locked behind glass, is a mercury fountain! First shown in the same Pavilion of the Spanish Republic as Guernica in 1937, and very much not behind glass then!8 Detail from a TINY Van Der Weyden Madonna @museothyssen in Madrid. I am always stunned by VdW, and the Deposition in the Prado is an incredible masterpiece, but the ability to work in such detail in a painting that is probably 8cm by 15 is just astonishing.9 Piero della Francesca head - an equally great painter, but I can’t help but think this looks like what happened when you put a LEGO head on backwards…10&11 Hands from Lucien Freud’s portrait of Baron Thyssen whose collection this was, and, mean-spiritedly, the unbelievably bad portraits of him and his wife that hang in the lobby of the museum too. Genuinely hilarious in a Trumpian way.12 Richard Serra @reinasofiamuseum - wonderful to see Guernica but this makes a better picture.13 Richard Rogers airport - somehow the shapes here fit with the vaulting of the Sagrda, although faaaar too big to be practical, definitely one of the more architecturally interesting airports to sit around in.And finally a massive tribute to the Prado for not allowing photos at all, as much as I like taking art pics it makes the experience of seeing incredibly famous paintings in not huge spaces so much more enjoyable. I hope more museums can be so brave. by @hills_alex

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3 months ago

My piece for @plusminusensemble from Cafe Oto earlier in the year on the @bbcradio3 new music show last night. Can listen from the link (I start about 7 mins in but give the first piece a go too!)… https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002tm8c by @hills_alex

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3 months ago

333 takes (yes really)and 4 piano tunings later, Team Tasmania (also known as @joseph_havlat and @mark_knoop ) find their way to the end of our recording session. An astonishing privilege and pleasure working with these two incredible musicians. Results will appear in the outside world before too long. And yes our booth was also a shoe cupboard… by @hills_alex

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4 months ago

Berlin for the weekend:Beautiful snowy Tiergarten to run aroundLovely installation that was once an opera by Petrit HalilajAnd @louisdheudieres being asked an interesting question, both at Hamburger BanhofAbsurdly good food and wine (yes, that really is a sea urchin hot pocket) @julius.ernst.berlin and @ernst.cave - it is really not easy to explain how special this was. by @hills_alex

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5 months ago

1 week to go promotional activities! My first piano recital in awhile (ahem)… Feb 4th 1230 pm St Botolph’s Without Aldgate (Aldgate High St)… Bach, Fauré, Brahms. Friendly (or even critical) faces welcome. by @hills_alex

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6 months ago

The very beginning, the middle (included largely because this bit is VERY hard and it came out pretty much right to my surprise) and very end of a piano recital I will be giving in exactly 2 weeks @botolphaldgate - if you want to find out what happens in between come along. Just 30 mins - Bach Brahms Faure. Wed Feb 4th 1230 St Botolph-Without-Aldgate EC3N 1AB (near Whitechapel). Free! Would love to see friendly faces! by @hills_alex

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6 months ago

Another cover on Night 3 of Plus Minus at Café Oto.Alex Hills’s Andante and Presto No Longer for string quartet (2025) responds to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931)In this video, Alex talks through his piece and its dialogue with Crawford Seeger.📍 Café Oto, 14th Jan🎟️ Tickets in bio#newmusic #london #chambermusic #experimentalmusic #cafeoto by @hills_alex

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7 months ago