Today is the final day of Lent, so it’s time to draw my series focussing on music by women composers to a close. As it’s Easter Eve, the time associated with the great late-night vigil, i can’t think of a more appropriate piece with which to end the Lent Series than Crepuscular Hour by the Norwegian composer Maja S K Ratkje. Originally completed in 2010, the work—which, as the name suggests, lasts a full hour—is intended to be performed in a large, resonant space, such as a cathedral, with the musicians surrounding the audience. These musicians, comprising three choirs, three pairs of noise musicians & a church organ, fill the environment with sound that works both to evoke the effect of crepuscular rays (strong shafts of sunlight emerging from cloud, typically seen at dawn & dusk) & also to transport the audience on a form of meditative journey. The structure of a composition, after all, is not that dissimilar from that of a liturgy, & Crepuscular Hour is in essence an abstract liturgical act, one that doesn’t so much impel meaning on the faithful as provide stimuli & a framework for our own individualised meditations.
i was surprised to realise recently that, apart from 
Back to the Lent Series, & a work by the Japanese composer Misato Mochizuki. Mochizuki’s compositional outlook encompasses both east & west, perhaps a by-product of periods of study in Tokyo & Paris (at IRCAM, where she studied with Tristan Murail). For the last five years, Mochizuki has taught at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, but her work continues to be performed regularly in France. She’s a bit of an unknown quantity in the UK, but that situation may improve with the release a few days ago of 
Alongside the collection of impressive soloistic new releases 
The next piece in my Lent Series is by German composer Brigitta Muntendorf, based in Cologne. Muntendorf’s work is heavily characterised by overt theatricality; three years ago, in Salzburg, Muntendorf premièred her first music theatre work Wer zum Teufel ist Gerty (
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Hope without hope: Mark-Anthony Turnage – L’espoir (from Speranza, World Première)
There’s an interesting small addendum to be made to my article a couple of days ago, reviewing recent CDs. i commented that LSO Live has released the world première performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s large-scale orchestral work Speranza, but what the disc doesn’t contain is the entirety of the piece as heard on that first occasion. Anyone in the concert hall or who (like me) heard the live broadcast may be forgiven for feeling some dismay at discovering one of the most curious but lovely parts of the piece to be entirely absent from the CD release. Turnage initially conceived Speranza in five movements, each titled with the word ‘hope’ in different languages, & it’s the original fourth movement, L’espoir, which he appears to have decided to excise from the work. Considering the pair of interviews i’ve heard where Turnage discusses Speranza, one could perhaps have seen this coming; on both occasions (once prior to the performance, the other on the BBC’s The Strand Archive), Turnage’s description of the five movements rather skirts over the fourth, almost apologising for it, both in terms of compositional individuality—with reference to the use of borrowed melodies, which Turnage states “I did nothing to actually”—& also aesthetic, essentially dismissing it as “a real moody piece … more of a textural piece, which is unusual for me, just chords & rather desolate tunes”. Read more