It’s been announced this morning that the Composer in Residence at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival will be Georg Friedrich Haas. His work has been an occasional feature at HCMF in the past, nowhere more spectacularly than in the 2013 UK première of in vain, a piece concerning itself with endless states of transition, with an added air of theatricality through having all of the lights in the performance space extinguished at various points.
HCMF 2016 will include three UK premières: Klangforum Wien will present The Hyena for ensemble and narrator (featuring the composer’s wife, Mollena Williams-Haas), the Ardittis – who else? – will be performing the Ninth String Quartet, while the Hannover Trombone Unit will take on Haas’ Octet for Eight Trombones, composed last year. All three of these performances will be taking place in the opening weekend, ensuring the festival begins with a hefty wallop.
Tickets for these events will go on sale later this month. With this year’s Proms promising little more than lumbering predictability and blandness, it’s encouraging to have a much more exciting prospect on the horizon. More info about HCMF in due course.
And BBC3 damn jolly well better broadcast more of these concerts on Hear & Now in December/January (especially the Arditti gigs).
Yes Sparky — I remember the waste of the entire Dillon string quartets in 2010.
Btw, there’s an interesting discussion of “in vain” at the first and as yet only issue of Talking Musicology.
Cliff, i spoke with Dillon about the fact the quartets weren’t going to be broadcast shortly before the concerts started (it was clear they wouldn’t be; no microphones anywhere in sight), and he said the Ardittis were in the process of recording them, and that was the reason. Although it seemed fair enough to me at the time, in hindsight this seems strange considering how often precisely this sort of things happens on Radio 3 (just last year, they broadcast the world première of Michel van der Aa’s Violin Concerto, the very same performance of which was soon after released on CD!). The decision not to broadcast must have come from the Ardittis, and i agree that it was a real shame (and, to date, no CD release has materialised). It provided a deeply illuminating exploration of Dillon’s thinking and practice in a highly concentrated way. Last year’s final Arditti concert was broadcast, though, so hopefully the “Dillon affair” was just a one-off.
That’s interesting to know, thanks. A question to sneak into the next meet the performers session!
Oops! There is indeed a second edition now. Apologies for not checking this first.