Lots of ensembles and festivals have been making concert announcements recently, so here’s a whistle-stop tour through some of the more interesting on the horizon.

Most imminent, this coming Friday (14th), is Riot Ensemble at King’s Place in London. They’ll be kicking off their new concert series ReNew with a trio of works: Liza Lim‘s Extinction events and dawn chorus (which has just been released on CD; review to come soon), Laurence Osborn‘s CTRL and Like a memory of birds (ii) by Riot conductor Aaron Holloway-Nahum.

Maybe it’s just me but i can’t think of many better ways to spend Valentine’s Day. Full details here.

Also this week, also in London, is the latest Illuminate concert, which this time finds them at the Royal College of Music. The programme once again consists of an interesting blend of new and not-so-new, including Jennifer Higdon‘s Dark Wood and Kaija Saariaho‘s Mirrors alongside Amy Beach‘s Pastorale for Woodwind Quintet and Henriëtte Bosmans‘ String Quartet.

The concert starts at 3pm and there’s a pre-concert chinwag an hour beforehand with Illuminate’s Angela Slater and the RCM’s Natasha Loges; both events are FREE, but tickets are required: you can get them here (talk) and here (concert).

Next week sees the return of the Electric Spring festival in Huddersfield. Once again spread over five days from Wednesday to Sunday, this year’s concerts will feature five new works for organ and electronics performed by Lauren Redhead & Alistair Zaldua, a large-scale workout for Huddersfield’s equally large-scale HISS system from Louise Rossiter, an evening of who-knows-what from Weston Olencki and what will surely be a typically marvellous son et lumière display from Leafcutter John. There’ll also be a couple of installations running throughout by Simon Whetham (in the Richard Steinitz Building’s vast Atrium space) and Jackson Mouldycliff, plus a workshop with Pam Hulme and the usual Creative Coding Lab Symposium and geekalicious Modular Meets session on Sunday afternoon.

As ever, all events are FREE; full details here.

Beyond these shores, the programme for this year’s Borealis festival in Bergen has been announced. Borealis remains one of the most adventurous new music festivals i’ve ever attended, and this year is no exception. Trying to single out highlights is ridiculous considering pretty much everything is likely to be one, but especially interesting will be the world première of SOLD (a dog and pony show) – a new performance piece from chameleon-like vocalist Stine Janvin; assorted works by George Lewis performed by the wonderful Norwegian Naval Forces Band at the Natural History Museum; Ecstatic Material, a multimedia work from Beatrice Dillon & Keith Harrison that sounds like it will be not only sonically interesting but also downright sticky; Knut Vaage‘s new electroacoustic piece Hybrid spetakkel being premièred by BIT20 Ensemble; a three-way concert featuring John Chantler, Okkyung Lee & Nina Pixel; and a four-part evening of music celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landings featuring the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra.

It all promises to be outrageously fascinating and/or fascinatingly outrageous – the festival runs from 4 to 8 March, and full details can be found here.

The Philharmonia Orchestra’s next set of Music of Today concerts (curated by Unsuk Chin) is looking good. Next month there’ll be the chance to hear music by Xenakis and Aribert Reimann on 5 March (featuring pianist Nic Hodges), and two weeks later works by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Helena Tulve. On 14 May, percussionist Colin Currie will be giving the first performance of Luke Bedford‘s latest piece alongside music by Philippe Hurel, while the following week’s concert features three world premières from Joel Järventausta, Jocelyn Campbell and Hollie Harding.

All four concerts are FREE; the 19th March concert (Salonen and Tulve) is at the Purcell Room and needs a pre-booked ticket, but for all of the rest, at the Royal Festival Hall, you can just turn up; full details here.

Slightly further ahead is Louth Contemporary Music Society‘s annual two-day shindig, which this year is titled ‘The Gathering’. It gets its name from a string quartet by Christos Hatzis, which will be performed by the Esposito Quartet. There’ll also be new works from Leo Brouwer, Pascale Criton and Gloria Coates, and the festival will close with one of Estonia’s finest choirs, Vox Clamantis, presenting works by Helena Tulve, Kevin Volans, Siobhán Cleary and (surprise, surprise) Arvo Pärt.

‘The Gathering’ runs from 19 to 20 June in Dundalk on the east coast of Ireland; full details can be found here, and impressively cheap early bird tickets are available now.

From its inception, one of the key features of 5:4 has been my desire to explore music that is not widely heard or available or understood. That exploration has in part taken the form of plundering my extensive archive of off-air radio recordings, an archive that i began while i was still at school (originally on cassette, being part of the generation the BPI decided were ‘killing music‘), and which continues to expand all the time. In the dozen years since, that archive has become, if not the backbone of the blog, then at least a primary source for the 5:4 musical journey, shaping both the broad scope and the individual details of my explorations. Unfortunately, it seems that this aspect of the blog needs to come to an end.

A couple of days ago, i received an email from ‘BBC IP Litigation’ asking me to remove an off-air recording i was sharing on 5:4, of a work premièred during the 2016 Proms. Obviously, i complied with this request immediately. It’s by no means the first time i’ve removed a recording from the blog. Usually, i’ve done this when a professional recording becomes available, as it’s not my intention to impinge on sales, particularly as many if not most labels devoted to contemporary music struggle to make ends meet. However, it’s the first time – in 5:4‘s entire 12-year lifespan – that the BBC has contacted me about this, and while they didn’t explicitly acknowledge the existence of any other recordings on the blog, they did request that i refrain from making recordings available in future. i wouldn’t want their polite request to escalate into something less palatable. So with immediate effect i’ve begun removing all the links to download the recordings i’ve shared on 5:4 over the years.

Of course, the written content of the blog is completely unaffected by this. Furthermore, sharing recordings in this way has never been the primary purpose or focus of 5:4, being just one aspect alongside my writing about concerts and festivals, new releases, as well as ongoing series like The Dialogues and Mixtapes. Nonetheless, from my perspective, this is not a minor change in the way i regard and write 5:4. Going forward, it will require a different approach taken when critiquing newly-premièred compositions – presumably linking instead to the BBC’s own streaming service, BBC Sounds – but more significantly it will make my regular explorations of older works – which aren’t available to buy or stream anywhere – such as those featured in my annual Lent Series or the recent series of articles at the start of winter, impossible to continue in the same form as previously.

Ultimately, i hope that the main attraction of 5:4 is my writing, and that this matters more than simply being a repository for audio downloads. That being said, i’ve always believed my writing is at its most effective and meaningful when presented hand-in-hand with the ability to hear the music being discussed. However, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a subset of my audience (hopefully, a small one) who comes to the blog solely for the downloads and couldn’t be less interested in my words about the music.

i realise i’ve not intimated thus far how i actually feel about this. As matters of a legal persuasion are all about what’s black and what’s white, i’m not sure feelings come into it, but strictly between you, me and the blogosphere, i’m quite heartbroken.

i know there will be a a lot of you – not least many of the composers and performers i’ve written about over the years – who will be as depressed about this as i am (i’ve already received my first email from one such composer; i expect more). i can only hope that you understand the situation and why i’ve come to the conclusion that 5:4 needs to change somewhat. The blog will of course continue – onwards and upwards and all that – but i do need to reflect on the whole way i go about writing about new music, and my future goals and aspirations for 5:4. This may need a little time to work out, so i hope you’ll bear with me.