Having packed up for their summer break, ensembles and festivals are starting to get going again in the weeks and months ahead. Most immediately, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is poised to pop the corks in celebration of their 30th birthday. There’s a couple of events happening in London: on 2 …
more articles
-
-
FestivalsPremières
Proms 2017: Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Jonathan Dove, Daniel Saleeb – Chorale Preludes (World Premières)
by 5:4As will have been clear from my 38th mixtape back in April, my love affair with the organ has been a long and significant one. It’s an instrument that often gets overlooked in the world of contemporary music, so a definite plus of this year’s Proms season has been the …
-
FestivalsPremières
Proms 2017: Thomas Larcher – Nocturne – Insomnia (UK Première); Michael Gordon – Big Space (World Première)
by 5:4Listening to two recent Proms premières back-to-back, Thomas Larcher‘s Nocturne – Insomnia and Michael Gordon‘s Big Space, turned out to be thought-provoking in ways that i’m sure are entirely unrelated to the composers’ intentions. The reason is that both pieces seem to be poles-apart approaches to creating the musical equivalent of …
-
The music of Mark-Anthony Turnage has been on my mind quite a bit of late. i’ve been revisiting my aged CD of his seminal work Three Screaming Popes, released 25 years ago, which was also the first piece of Turnage’s i ever heard performed live, during my undergrad days in Birmingham. …
-
As i mentioned in my recent essay for Sounds Like Now, the statistics for contemporary music by women at the 2017 Proms concerts are lamentable: four-fifths of the new music heard this year is by men. Judith Weir is therefore something of an exception – doubly so, as not only …
-
This afternoon’s Prom concert, titled Bach’s ‘Little Organ Book’ past and present, affords the opportunity to hear no fewer than three world premières, each of them short works continuing the Germanic tradition of the chorale prelude, reworking hymn tunes. One of the composers featured is Cheryl Frances-Hoad, and as preparation for …
-
i forgot to say: i’m now on holiday for a little while, so normal service will resume next week. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, make sure you have your say about each and every one of the previous Proms premières on the Polls page. Toodle pip.
-
Around a month ago, i bumped into Brian Elias at the Cheltenham Music Festival, and we had a brief chat about his forthcoming Cello Concerto, premièred a couple of nights ago at the Proms. As i mentioned in my article with his pre-première questions, he expressed some reservations about including …
-
This evening’s Prom concert includes the world première of the new Cello Concerto by India-born, British composer Brian Elias. It’s five years since his music was last heard at the Proms, when his powerful scena Electra Mourns (setting Sophocles) received its first performance, and tonight is Elias’ fourth appearance at the …
-
i’ve written a fair bit about Estonian music this year, and in many ways composer Erkki-Sven Tüür breaks the mould. There’s not, of course, just one approach to be found in contemporary music in Estonia, yet significant evidence of outside musical influences (as i’ve noted previously) can be difficult to find. …
-
One of Estonian’s best-known composers, Erkki-Sven Tüür, makes his second visit to the Proms this evening, for the UK première of his work for strings Flamma by the Australian Chamber Orchestra (he was last heard at the Royal Albert Hall in 2003, with the Concerto for Violin). Like most of his fellow Estonians, …
-
Ephimeral is a recent release of electronic music by Spanish composer and sound artist Miguel Angel Tolosa. Tolosa first got my attention in 2015 with Loner, his superb collaboration with Ingar Zach (which ended up on my Best Albums of 2015) and this disc has got me just as excited. That title, …
-
James MacMillan’s latest religious blockbuster, A European Requiem, was given its first performance in Europe at the Proms a couple of days ago. The piece is a little over a year old (premièred in July 2016 in Oregon), and although its concert hall life has taken place in the midst …
-
It’s quite unusual to be sitting down to enjoy the Proms première of a piece you already know quite well. But that was the case with Anders Hillborg‘s Sirens, which received its first UK performance a couple of days ago by Swedish sopranos Ida Falk Winland and Hannah Holgersson with the BBC …
-
At the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the world première of Body-Opera by Polish composer Wojtek Blecharz didn’t exactly go to plan. Located at The Hepworth Wakefield – and set up somewhat hurriedly in the aftermath of the awarding of The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture that had recently taken place – an ensuing …
-
CD/Digital releases
New releases: John Wall & Mark Durgan; John Edwards / Mark Sanders / John Wall
by 5:4Regular readers of 5:4 will know how fascinated i am by the music of John Wall, and the last couple of months have seen two new releases featuring Wall alongside some his most long-standing collaborators. In collusion with Mark Durgan is Contrapt, a 39-minute sequence of pieces culled from free improvisations …
-
Last autumn, at the Royal Musical Association’s annual conference, composer Julian Anderson presented a paper addressing what he described as “the problem of professionals involved in modern music denigrating and otherwise attempting to devalue the music they are supposed to support”. The paper – which unfortunately i’ve not yet been able …
-
Here it is at last, announced in the last few minutes is the complete programme for this year’s 40 edition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which begins in a little under four months’ time, running from Friday 17–Sunday 26 November. In addition to the highlights i’ve previously mentioned, there’s …
-
Despite being composed and first performed nearly six years ago, and also being released on CD in 2015, Swedish composer Anders Hillborg‘s Sirens, a large-scale work for two sopranos, chorus and orchestra, hasn’t yet been performed in the UK. Until, that is, this evening, when it finally receives its UK …
-
Last Sunday afternoon, French composer Laurent Durupt‘s new work Grids for Greed was given its first performance by the Van Kuijk Quartet at the second Proms Chamber Music concert, in Cadogan Hall. In his answers to my pre-première questions, Durupt made two remarks that are clearly most important to the …