Presenting Paul Rissmann’s Alice Concert Suites & The Alice Sound Website

Watch The Alice Sound presentation on YouTube.

10AM Pacific/ 1PM Eastern/ 6PM UK

This presentation offers an exclusive behind-the-scenes understanding of Paul’s two concert suites based on the Alice books which premiered at the Barbican, London in 2015 and 2022 respectively. We will briefly outline the genesis of the collaborative project which led to the production of these works aimed at a family audience. Using recordings of the productions, Paul will then outline the challenges and opportunities involved in this process and the creative solutions (sometimes involving kitchen equipment!) he came up with. Finally, we will give a brief tour of The Alice Sound website which offers permanent, free access to Paul’s works and to a rich array of learning resources spanning literature, music, art and drama.

About Paul Rissmann

Described by Neue Muzikzeitung as ‘the Jamie Oliver of animateurs’, Paul enjoys a varied career which includes composing music, talking about music and inspiring others to make and perform their own music. He currently holds the positions of Animateur with the London Symphony Orchestra and Children’s Composer in Residence for Music in the Round.

Paul is a passionate music educationist whose projects has been acclaimed by the Royal Philharmonic Society and Royal Television Society. In 2014, he appeared as creative director in a Channel 4 documentary Addicts’ Symphony, which explored how music can be therapeutic in overcoming addiction.

Frequently commissioned to transform children’s literature into symphonic scores, Paul won a British Composer Award in 2012 and was nominated for an Ivor Novello Composer Award in 2020. His music has been commissioned and performed by orchestras all over the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, West Australian Symphony Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Paul creates and performs bespoke orchestral events for people of all ages which range from full-scale concerts for the under-5s to a critically acclaimed series of music discovery concerts for adults called Naked Classics. He has guest-presented Classics Unwrapped and Inside Music for BBC Radio, dissected the world of opera for Glyndebourne in Behind the Curtain and performed a series of open-air classical concerts with the LSO in London’s Trafalgar Square.

About Kiera Vaclavik

Kiera Vaclavik is Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary University of London. Kiera’s research centers on children’s literature and childhood culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on Victorian works and their afterlives. Her project exploring the Alice books in relation to fashion and dress was supported by a 24-month AHRC fellowship and led to outputs including a fabric collection with Liberty, London, “The Alice Look” exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood which she curated (2015), and the monograph, Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll’s Icon, 1860-1901 (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her most recent work on Carroll explores the long and fascinating tradition of male performance of Alice’s role, as well as the sonic dimension of his Alice books.