David Sawer's new ballet Rumpelstiltskin recently completed its world premiere tour of the UK gathering rave reviews along the way. A unique hybrid of opera and ballet, Sawer collaborated with director Richard Jones and designer Stewart Laing in this re-telling of the familiar Brothers Grimm fairy tale in a completely new way performed by six dancers and thirteen musicians from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

...Jones and Sawer cunningly make this Brothers Grimm fable work on two levels. On the one hand it's grotesque knockabout fun, superbly staged in an ingenious wooden box, like a magician's cabinet, so many surprises does it conceal. On another level, however, the work operates as a sharp, stark satire on material greed, and the appalling life choices that avarice forces upon us. Sawer's score is a tour de force of mostly ominous effects (his spectacular evocation of wedding bells would have impressed even past masters such as Britten and Mussorgsky), and gradually mounting frenzy as Rumpelstiltskin makes his repeated demands for his "pound of flesh."
- Richard Morrison, The Times, UK

Sawer's music propels it all, and provides its own layer of abstract theatre by dividing the ensemble into two groups on opposite sides of the performing area and instructing players to commute from one to the other. The turning of straw into gold is accompanied by interwoven skeins of strings; Rumpelstiltskin's appearance is heralded by raucous wind writing, and the wedding of the miller's daughter to the king by bell-like sonorities. The score is a tautly structured mosaic of ideas, each relatively simple but infinitely suggestive.
- Andrew Clements, The Guardian

Sawer's score is entrancing. Exquisitely scored for 13 players, it is dark, lean and jagged, embracing both eerie menace and seductive charm.
- Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph

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Read the critics' full reviews at www.timesonline.co.uk, www.guardian.co.uk and www.telegraph.co.uk.

For more on the music of David Sawer, visit www.universaledition.com.

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David Sawer
Rumpelstiltskin (2009)
for chamber orchestra and six dancers
1.1(ca).2(bcl).1-1.1.0.1-hp-vn.va.vc.db
45'