Liquid Life
Commissioned by The McNicol Ballet Collective, 2025
Performed at The Royal Academy of Music, 5th April, 2025
Choreographer: Andrew McNicol
“(A) brilliant soundtrack by Jeremy Birchall”
Christopher Holmes - The Reviews Hub ★★★★★
“Dancers interpret Birchall’s new musical commission…a blend of synthesiser and classical (lovely strings), and for some reason it seems familiar. There are American voices in this reverberating soundscape, a film score… Beats kick in, funky beats, and the moves become formation, more spontaneous. Lights change to only sidelights, the floor clears and the dancers let go. Dance for dance’s sake. The past and the present seem to commune in no man’s land.”
Vera Liber - British Theatre Guide
The premiere piece… airs a new composition by Jeremy Birchall especially commissioned… which melds those same classical notes, full of big strings, with more technological and digital sounds comprised of fuzzy radio vocals, beeps and clicks that give the choreographer scope to create a broad-ranging piece about human connection with its moments of isolation, togetherness and support that evolve across the 30-minute dance.
Maryam Philpott - The Reviews Hub ★★★★
There were four musicians on the stage (two violins, a viola and a cello) and their interaction with the taped music was clever and worked very well. They complemented each other perfectly.
Simonetta Dixon - BalletcoForum ★★★★
Birchall provided an intriguing original score for the final ballet of the evening Liquid Life that seamlessly mixed a live string quartet, with recorded music incorporating sounds from everyday life such as muffled emergency sirens.
Alexander Simpkins - Bachtrack ★★★
Photos © Vikki Sloviter for BalletX
Everything InBetween
Commissioned by BalletX, Philadelphia, 2024
Performed at The Wilma Theater, Philadelphia PA 10th - 21st July, 2024
Choreographer: Stina Quagebeur
Principal dancers: Francesca Forcella and Jerard Palazo
“Composer Jeremy Birchall’s original orchestral score is shadowy and introspective…This audience embraced this work with extended applause.”
Lewis Whittington - Culture Vulture
“Composer Jeremy Birchall’s original score gave us a penchant underpinning for this peek into couple’s therapy.”
Merilyn Jackson - Fjord Review
“In pairs and solos they play out the stories of the couple to composer Jeremy Birchall’s mournful, minimalist music…They meet, break apart again, and at the end, they remain torn between their love and their pain. Masterful.”
Camille Bacon-Smith - Broad Street Review
Photos © Cheryl Mann
Hungry Ghosts
Commissioned by The Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, 2024
Performed at The Lyric Opera House, Chicago 15-25 February, 2024
Choreographer: Stina Quagebeur
Principal dancers: Anais Bueno and Hyuma Kiyosawa
Performed by the Lyric Opera Orchestra, conducted by Scott Speck.
Solo Cello: Ana Kim
Solo piano: Jorge Ivars
'"The music by Jeremy Birchall — a blend of live orchestra and recorded tracks — is the perfect container for Quagebeur’s choreography. She does a fine job in the quieter moments, …but it’s a swirling cacophony that sweeps up Bueno and Kiyosawa in a blurry, unhinged corps de ballet that really captures the tragedy, trauma and abdication of will associated with addiction."
Lauren Warnecke, Chicago Tribune ★★★★
"Jeremy Birchall’s music was absolute perfection: alternately discordant and mellifluous; simultaneously strident and harmonic. I trust I’m not trespassing when I say that clearly neither Quagebeur nor Birchall learned about addiction by reading about it in a book – their intimate sophistication can only be gained the hard way."
Sarz Maxwell, Buzz Center Stage
"Stina Quagebeur’s “Hungry Ghosts,” a work set to an ideal score by Jeremy Birchall that captures the obsession and emotional isolation of those addicted to opioids (such drugs as heroin, fentanyl and others)…The response of the enormous opening night audience could not have been more intense or fully deserved."
Hedy Weiss, WTTW, Chicago
"This hard-edged piece, with its operatic drama and cinematic stage effects mirroring the murky chaos of the woman’s drug-addicted life, is backed by Jeremy Birchall’s electronic-tinged music, which has a dissonant touch that suits the ballet’s dark-blue nature."
Hugh Iglarsh, Newcity
"Quagbebeur's choreography has a perfect edge of menace and darkness blending with the haunting music of Jeremy Birchall."
Kathy D Hey, Third Coast Review ★★★★
"Jeremy Birchall’s music faithfully parallels the ballet’s emotional odyssey; adding to its depth and intensity."
City Pleasures, Chicago
"Light, shadow, and facial expressions are used to significant effect here, as are sound and Jeremy Birchall’s score. A repeated sound like a sharp match being lit, the use of a black background, and dancers in shadow (creating a uniform look and making indistinguishable the features of individual dancers) nod to the way that drug dependence can render people incapable of anything but servitude to themselves and their addiction."
JT Newman, Chicago Reader
Nostalgia
Nostalgia captures that bittersweet emotion.
A state of longing, poignancy, a piercing joy as well as an acute awareness of passing time.
It recognises the light and dark, it’s a quiet force that transforms our pain and connects us together.
Nostalgia, Northern Ballet, 2022
Performed at Leeds Playhouse 10-17 September and Royal Opera House, Linbury Theatre, 1-3 November 2022
Choreographer: Stina Quagebeur
Designer: Louie Whitmore
Principal dancers: Minju Kang and Jonathan Hanks
Photography © Emma Kauldhar
"Set to Jeremy Birchall's contemplative mood music..."
Debra Crane, The Times
"Good, better, best was the satisfying trajectory of Northern Ballet’s terrific programme of three original short works"
Rupert Christiansen, The Spectator
"The music by Jeremy Birchall is an evocative soundscape that serves the purposes of the ballet well"
Mike Dixon, Dance Europe
"...the haunting music of Jeremy Birchall..."
Graham Watts, Bachtrack
"Quagebeur, responding to Jeremy Birchall's pensive score for piano and strings..."
Donald Hutera, The Stage
"The music captures their moods perfectly..."
David Mead, Seeing Dance
"Quagebeur's lyrical choreography fits snugly within the framework of Birchall's phrasing"
Deborah Weiss, Dance for You Magazine
Catching Colour, English National Ballet and The Line, 2022
Choreographer: Stina Quagebeur