i’m off to Sweden to catch a few days of the Baltic Sea Festival (including the world première of Sven-David Sandström’s new opera The Performance tomorrow afternoon), so reviews of the Proms premières will continue when i’m back later next week.
Hejdå för nu…
Further information has been made available today about this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, following the announcement in May that Georg Friedrich Haas will be the featured Composer in Residence. Predictably, there’s a great deal to get excited about. The music of Harry Partch will be making an appearance courtesy of Ensemble Musikfabrik, who’ve done so much to promote Partch over the last few years, reconstructing his vast array of weird and wonderful microtonal instruments (their rendition of his And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma at Bristol New Music 2014 was a dazzling testament both to the ensemble’s meticulous care/preparation as well as to Partch’s discombobulating approach to—well, pretty much everything). To expand upon this, the ensemble has commissioned composers to write for these instruments, and will be premièring several of them at this year’s festival, including an hour long work by Claudia Molitor titled Walking with Partch.
Swiss composer Alfred Zimmerlin will be bringing his Stone Orchestra to Huddersfield, and the festival’s fondness for improvisation will this year be entertained by Peter Brötzmann and Gareth Davis, the latter appearing once again in conjunction with the music of American composer/guitarist Elliott Sharp (of whose solo contrabass clarinet piece Silva Silvarum Davis gave a wonderful first performance a couple of years ago). Having brought the festival to an end in recent years, the Arditti Quartet will this time be getting it up and running with an opening night concert alongside contemporary music’s most radical nightingale, Jennifer Walshe, giving the UK première of Walshe’s Everything is Important (which, coincidentally, received its world première in Darmstadt just last night). The Ardittis will also be joining with Klangforum Wien in a concert presenting two major works by Haas, The Hyena and his brand spanking new String Quartet No. 10. The Diotima Quartet will also be appearing, performing new works by Enno Poppe and Sam Hayden, and HCMF regular Richard Uttley is back with music by Haas, Eric Wubbels and Olga Neuwirth, as well as—best of all—a new piece for Fender Rhodes piano by Michael Cutting, whose This Is Not A Faux Wood Keyboard remains a particularly memorable highlight from last year.
Throw in new and recent works from the likes of Rebecca Saunders, Liza Lim, Eva Reiter, George Lewis and John Zorn and HCMF 2016 is already shaping up to be a typically kaleidoscopic and challenging festival. It runs from Friday 18 to Sunday 27 November; full details and tickets are available from the festival website.
Last week saw the centenary of the birth of American composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt continues to be a neglected figure, and personally speaking, the anniversary served to remind how little i know of his music and how rarely i’ve encountered it over the years. Those in a similar situation will no doubt be interested in the Babbitt Centenary Concert taking place tomorrow evening at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space in New York. The concert, which will also be video-streamed live, is being given by the NY-based Cygnus Ensemble, and features two works of Babbitt’s – including Swan Song No. 1, written specifically for Cygnus in 2003 – alongside music by students and colleagues of Babbitt, all world premières. There’ll also be a pre-concert interview with soprano Bethany Beardslee-Winham, for whom Babbitt composed numerous works, including Philomel, Vision and Prayer (also being performed in the concert), Du, and A Solo Requiem.
The complete programme is listed below; more details can be found at the Cygnus website and the live stream (which is free) will be available at livamp.com/cygnus. The concert starts at 7:30pm local time, which means a late night for those outside the US who want to catch it as it happens, but for everyone else it’ll be available to stream afterwards at a more congenial hour.
Milton Babbitt – Swan Song No. 1 / Vision and Prayer
Charles Wuorinen – Cygnus
Paul Lansky – Just Once
Konrad Kaczmarek – Toggles and Triggers
Jonathan Dawe – Glass Harmonica
Frank Brickle – Ab nou cor / Piazza Piece / City of Orgies
David Claman – To the Master of the Meteor
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.
i’ve recently returned from a trip to Tallinn to experience some of the annual Estonian Music Days (my reviews can be read over on Bachtrack). In a bit of spare time one afternoon, i finally got around to examining the forthcoming Proms season, and i don’t think it’s entirely due to the fact i was in the midst of a genuinely bold, experimental festival that, from the perspective of new music, Proms 2016 seems so poor bordering on lamentable. In terms of quantity, contemporary music – always a tertiary concern at the Proms after 1) established repertoire and 2) the increasingly desperate need to appear ‘trendy’ – isn’t represented too badly, with 52 works scattered throughout the season (only six of which are by women composers), including 13 world and 10 UK premières. But the choices, particularly in the case of the world premières, are appallingly predictable and narrow-minded, and the less said about the decision to perform Steve Reich in Peckham’s Bold Tendencies car park the better, as it may be an all-time low for the Proms, clearly trying to imitate LCMF. It’s hard to believe the decision-makers have a meaningful grip on what’s actually going on in contemporary music; certainly, if this is indicative of David Pickard’s vision for the Proms, that vision is suffering from an extreme case of myopia. Read more
It’s November, which of course means that the annual pilgrimage to the UK’s new music mecca is only a few weeks’ away. The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has this year opted for a demonstrably reflective tone, building on the remarkable performances of music by, in particular, Jakob Ullmann and Antoine Beuger a couple of years ago, which to my mind at least constituted an interesting departure from HCMF’s more conventional fare. Jakob Ullmann is this year represented by a pair of substantial new works—a half-hour solo double bass piece premièred by Dominic Lash and the 90-minute la segunda canción del ángel desaparecido—and while Beuger is absent, the festival’s composer-in-residence is Jürg Frey, who has long been associated with Beuger’s Wandelweiser Group. Five concerts provide an extensive opportunity to become immersed in Frey’s music, with major explorations being presented by Quatuor Bozzini, Ensemble Grizzana and Philip Thomas. Read more
It’s that time again; the 2015 Proms season has today been unveiled, and once again offers more than a few treats for lovers of new music. That’s putting it extremely mildly; in truth, the amount of contemporary music in this year’s concerts is actually rather jaw-dropping, with no fewer than 20 world premières, plus a host of European and UK first performances and a healthy additional cluster of recent works. Having been temporarily usurped in 2014, the tradition of a world première in the opening concert has been restored, the honour this time falling to Gary Carpenter, whose new work Dadaville i would expect to provide something more meaty than the ephemeral offerings of the last few years. Encouragingly, a third of the first performances are works by women composers, including a Tallis homage from Cheryl Frances-Hoad, ensemble pieces by Shiori Usui and Birmingham Conservatoire alumnus Joanna Lee, a piano concerto from Anna Meredith, something Nordic-inspired from Alissa Firsova, and new orchestral works by Tansy Davies and Eleanor Alberga, whose Arise, Athena! will kickstart the Last Night. Read more
