A quick heads-up about a forthcoming mini festival that will, i’m sure, turn out to pack a punch inversely proportional to its duration. Alba New Music is a new Scottish charity “devoted to celebrating the sonic avant garde”. Following a couple of one-off gigs earlier this year, they’re launching their first weekend of concerts, which will take place in Edinburgh on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 October. The line-up/repertoire is lip-smackingly inviting: on the Friday evening, Huddersfield guitar hero Diego Castro Magas will be giving a recital including music by Wieland Hoban and Richard Barrett alongside two works by Aaron Cassidy: The Pleats of Matter (which i found positively ear-boggling back at Electric Spring 2015) and the first UK performance of The wreck of former boundaries, premièred recently in Australia. Saturday is crammed with three events, starting with a free lunchtime concert by Edinburgh Experimental Musicians, including a diverse mix of pieces by John Hails, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros. In the early evening, flautist Richard Craig will be performing music by James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough and Fabrice Fitch, followed later by singer Peyee Chen, who’ll be getting her teeth stuck into works by George Aperghis, Michael Finnissy, Erin Gee, Scott McLaughlin and Jennifer Walshe.
Talk about hitting the ground running – it promises to be a fantastic and pretty intense couple of days. The main concerts are £8 a pop or you can do a triple-whammy for just £20. Full details on the Alba New Music website. i’ll be there trying to get my head around it all, so reviews to follow in due course.
Wednesday evening in Tewkesbury Abbey, in the company of Ex Cathedra conducted by Jeffrey Skidmore, was an encounter with a particular kind of British ubiquity. The music of Hubert Parry, Herbert Howells, Judith Weir and James MacMillan were brought together in an evening focussing on “A New Jerusalem”, four composers whose work, in the church and concert hall respectively, has become (for good or ill) highly pervasive. In the case of Parry and Howells, hearing them beyond the context of liturgical function revealed above all how much their approach to choral writing persists both in the legacy of 20th century church music and beyond as well as the ongoing choral evensong tradition, which for many years has sounded less like a modern expression of faith than a nostalgic clinging to values (both musical and theological) held by an ever-decreasing minority. Hearing them side by side made for an illuminating comparison. What Elgar was to the orchestra, Parry was to the choir, his music never solely about the text or topic at hand but with omnipresent obeisance to a sense of grandiose occasion looming over everything. (Put another way, what Elgar was to pomp, Parry was to circumstance.) 
Both the title of last night’s BCMG concert, ‘Remembering the Future’, and its prevailing tone emphasised a looking back, and with good reason, as this was the final concert in Stephen and Jackie Newbould’s long tenure running the ensemble. Thankfully, that didn’t cause the evening to sag into mere nostalgia, focusing instead on the world premières of four new commissions, prefaced by a pair of works from BCMG’s repertoire. The ensemble was reduced in size on this occasion to a mere seven players, making the concert more than usually intimate. 
It’s not often that, partway through an orchestral concert, i find myself imagining i’m a German paraglider. But that’s precisely how i felt yesterday evening in Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, during the world première of the Fifth Symphony by Bristol-based composer John Pickard. Not just any paraglider: 
