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The next two concerts to be given by the orchestra are to be in St. John's Smith Square, on Nov 15th and 16th, 2008 and will include the premiere of his sinfonía témpano.

Donations may be made in cash or cheques (in pounds sterling) and should be made payable to The Alvarez Chamber Orchestra and sent to the address given below.

The Alvarez Chamber Orchestra is a Registered Charity No. 1120668 and a Company Limited by Guarantee No. 6227728. Registered in England and Wales. Registered Office: 5 Rensburg Road London E17 7HL

All prospective sponsors and friends of the ACO can keep abreast of the latest developments here.

After leaving the NYOGB, Geoffrey Alvarez was a Leverhulme Scholar at the Royal Academy of Music, studying piano, violin, conducting, repetiteur skills and composition, concurrently attending English National Opera’s repetiteur course.

Whilst a postgraduate student at the University of York he participated in the 1986 International Dance Course for Professional Choreographers and Composers. In 1989, he obtained a Doctorate in Composition from York, having help rebuild the university’s New Music Ensemble - Anemone. Chair for two years, he conducted works by Pierre Boulez, Henze, Mellers etc., premiering pieces by Roger Marsh and David Collins, performing works by Ligeti, Swayne and Messiaen for two pianos with Dominic Saunders.

Returning to London in 1990, he taught Ethnomusicology and Classical Performance/Analysis at Goldsmiths College; the same year being awarded a composition prize in the Royal Overseas League Music Competition. In 1998 he tutored composition at the Caithness Summer Music School.

He has received commissions from artists/organisations such as Nicholas Daniel (Oboe Concerto), Nicholas Korth principle horn Oslo Symphony Orchestra:(Horn Trio The Cimmerian Sibyl), the Garden Venture of the Royal Opera House (The European Story), the Soho Theatre (Emisori Rites) English Country Opera (a completion of Mozart's Bastien and Bastienne). Several works have been purchased by the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. His song cycle Songs My Parrot Taught Me delighted Luciano Berio when he heard the C.D. conducted by Malcolm Singer during Alvarez’ visit to Berio's Florentine home in 1994. His Spinning Night is also to be recorded on C.D. with trombonist Alan Tomlinson, heard at the 1998 Festival of the British Trombone Society.

His lute pieces Teares and Lamentaçions for Scottish lutenist Rob MacKillop, published by the Lute Society have attracted international attention, being reviewed by Betsy Small for the Lute Society of America who also published his el primer olor, a song for bass and 6-course lute.

Notable performances include the improvisation of piano accompaniment to Hitchcock's The Lodger for the unveiling of a plaque commemorating his birthplace and the conducting of the première of his Cummings’ setting Love’s Own Secret for double choir, horn, organ and soloists. His Laughing Lotus received a London performance by the Harlequin Wind Quintet in March 1999, having been first performed the previous year at the Oxford Festival of Contemporary Music. 1999 also saw a revival of the ballet Kerb-Crawling in Oxford, conducted by Julian Faultless, first heard in the York Festival in 1989. His erotic setting of the XXIIIrd Psalm in Hebrew commissioned by soprano Lisa Nolan, was premièred in St. Cyprian’s Church, on October 7th at 7.30, 2000 and a wind quintet The Travelling Musicians, with additional parts for children, commissioned by the Harlequin Wind Quintet was first performed in July, the same year, at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, and his Second Symphony; ‘The Five Seasons’ for conductor Charles Peebles was completed. He gave a performance of his el duende, a setting of six poems by Federico García Lorca with tenor Kevin West at a concert organised by the Incorporated Society of Musicians North London Centre in 2006

As a composer, his concertino for piano and chamber orchestra was awarded a prize in the Tansman 6th International Competition of Musical Personalities, Composers Competition, Lodz 2006. The adjudicators included Krauze, Penderecki, Nyman, Holliger and Zur. He was pianoforte soloist in this work with the Arthur Rubenstein Philharmonic Orchestra in Lodz, conducted by Luca Pfaff.

Towards the end of 2000, he finished a song cycle ‘My Last Muse’ setting poems Graves wrote inspired by his ‘last Muse’: the dancer/choreographer Julia Simonne, who acted as advisor to the project. The Travelling Musicians was given a London première in an abridged version made by Harlequin Wind Quintet on January 6th, 7.30p.m. 2001 in the Purcell Room. He also wrote a piece for two clarinets and bassoon King Solomon’s Monsters, for performance in the Summer of 2001, commissioned by clarinettist/music psychologist Geoffrey Elkan. Later, early in 2001, two further sacred drinking songs were added to Psalm XXIII: one from the Rg Veda: Mandala 9.74, the other from The Chinese Book of Odes: The Eternal Southern Hill, for Lisa Nolan, Geoffrey Elkan and Christine Grieg. The same year saw his completion of Mozart's Bastien and Bastienne performed on June 8th and 9th at the Swaledale Festival in Yorkshire, directed by Philip Parr.

Although much of his output is influenced by archetypal religious imagery, Alvarez is also influenced by scientific ideas: a Superstring Quartet (a string quartet in ten parts based on a recent version of the Superstring Theory of physics which suggests that the universe consists of particles each consisting of one dimensional strings vibrating in a specific way in both four extended dimensions, and curled round in six dimensionalCalabi-Yau manifolds, thereby generating their mass) is dedicated to musicologist/scientific consultant Eila Bannister.

He is currently working on an orchestral piece based on flying called Plane-song and an opera - The King’s Last Prophecy - based on the beliefs of the Kogi of Colombia and Frazer's The Golden Bough .

A list of works is available here.

Further details of his writings, conducting and teaching may be obtained directly from the composer himself at geoffrey.alvarez@virgin.net. Several works, including his Nunc Dimitis - which he conducted on October 4th 2007 for The Celebration of Anna Greening's Life at All Hallows by the Tower, London - are available to be purchased, downloaded and printed out here.

The search for a ‘grammar of musical myth’ as Graves’ White Goddess is a ‘grammar of poetic myth’ - Gravesian Analysis - was initially proposed in a paper Geoffrey Alvarez delivered to the Robert Graves Society at the University of Manchester in September 1998, and subsequently published by Gravesiana, the Journal of the Robert Graves Society. This work attracted the attention of feminist theologian Asphodel Long, ethnomusicologist and editor of New Grove, Veronica Doubleday and the poetess Kathleen Raine. His review of work by Jonathan Harvey, Alexander Goehr, Wilfrid Mellers and Ian Pace has appeared in Tempo; his analytical review (the first) of the Northumbrian Symphony by Robert Sherlaw-Johnson was published in the June 2000 edition. His major study The Song of the Earth: Music and The Great Mother In Twentieth Century Europe formed a large part of a recent address to the Contemporary Music Society at the University of Oxford.