Premières

Though this year it only lasted five days instead of ten, i came away from the 2021 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with the distinct impression that, somehow, the usual quantity of music had been compressed into a reduced time frame. That’s not, mercifully, because of any attempt to shoehorn many…

In addition to the soundwalks, installations, music theatre, performance art and electroacoustic shenanigans, Ultima 2021 also had its fair share of more conventional ensemble concerts, which took place in two Oslo churches. The beautiful Tøyen Kirke played host to two of Norway’s most prominent new music ensembles, asamisimasa and Cikada.

Not everything i heard at Ultima 2021 was bound up in convolutions of meaning. Ryoji Ikeda‘s forays into the world of percussion (which i previously explored in 2018) are a sidestep away from his more central work in multi-layered representations and interpretations of data, instead concerned much more directly with…

The saying goes that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, but in the case of the Ultima festival in Oslo, the latter half of which i experienced last week, i don’t think i truly realised how much i’d missed contemporary music festivals until i was back in…

Two weeks have passed since this year’s Proms season came to an end, so it’s time to take a look at how you responded to each of the new works in the annual 5:4 Proms première polls. i want to thank all of you who voted; there was a healthy-sized…

The last time i wrote about a Birmingham Contemporary Music Group concert, i began the article with an observation, a complaint and a plea; this time, i’m starting with a shock and a nice surprise. The shock comes from the realisation that that previous concert took place no fewer than…

What is there left to say about the Last Night of the Proms, a.k.a “Now That’s What I Call Classical Music”? Less a concert than a party, for many years now the occasion has begun with a première, presumably intended to act as a champagne cork ‘pop’ to get things…

The penultimate première of this year’s Proms took place yesterday evening, in the form of a short, entertaining concert-opener courtesy of South Korean composer Unsuk Chin. Composed last year as part of the commemorations marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Chin’s Subito con forza flirts with a number of…

As i may have said previously, i have a love-hate relationship with film scores. Being something of a movie addict, i’m obviously encountering them all the time, and at their best, i adore how they don’t merely accompany the on-screen drama but contain their own distinctive parallel narrative, interesting in…

Until i began spending time with George Benjamin‘s new Concerto for Orchestra, given its first performance at last Monday’s Prom concert, i hadn’t realised how tired i’d become with narrative. Not that there’s anything wrong or even problematic about the concepts and conceits that have festooned each of the new…

Last Friday brought the first UK performance of the shortest, and by far the simplest, of this year’s Proms premières, Charlotte Bray‘s Where Icebergs Dance Away. Coming in the wake of some highly complex new works (none more so than George Lewis’ Minds in Flux) this was rather refreshing. In…

A word that rarely comes to mind when listening to Proms premières is “brave”. Bravery in music, to me, involves a demonstration of the composer’s singular vision to the extent that many, even all, of the expectations that i may bring to the piece as a listener are ignored, overturned,…

More Proms premières, more demands that composers must ‘respond’ to existing music. Perhaps by now the Proms organisers regard this approach as an integral, even defining, part of its commissioning strategy, but it demonstrates a complete lack of faith and trust in composers to forge their own unique conceptions from…

One of the things that’s pretty much guaranteed to pull me into a piece of contemporary (or indeed any) music and hold me there is having my expectations raised and then thwarted. In the case of the latest première at this year’s Proms, Parallel Universes by Swedish composer Britta Byström,…

Yesterday evening’s Prom concert included the third world première of the season, Augusta Read Thomas‘ orchestral work Dance Foldings. In her very detailed responses to my pre-première questions, Thomas discussed the science-related inspiration for the piece (which formed part of the commission brief) – specifically the “biological ‘ballet’ of proteins…

Yesterday evening’s Prom featured the second world première of the season, Cloudline by US composer Elizabeth Ogonek (whose answers to my pre-première questions you can read here). The title of her piece is interesting as it contains two opposite implications: ‘cloud’ indicates mutability and a concomitant uncertainty of shape, while…

Last night the 2021 Proms season began, featuring – as has been the custom for many years – the world première of a new piece. When Soft Voices Die is a choral work by Scottish composer James MacMillan that brings together two texts by Shelley, Mutability (also known as ‘The…

Despite its name, it’s important to note that not everything performed at this year’s inaugural Baltic Music Days originated in the Baltic (though all of the performers did). Among the most striking of the international pieces was Spur by Austrian composer Beat Furrer. Composed in 1998, it was especially interesting…

Does the phrase “Baltic music” mean anything? Is it something that has a discrete, tangible identity? i found myself considering this question during pretty much every concert of this year’s first ever Baltic Music Days. A festival that’s been in the offing for a number of years, bringing together composers…

In addition to the various multimedia / audiovisual events at Borealis 2021, the festival included a number of more conventional concerts. Violinist Ricardo Odriozola’s recital featured a mix of Norwegian, British and US works, two of which, Dániel Péter Biró‘s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Moshe Went Up and Tim Hodgkinson‘s The Landscape Theory…