In terms of volume, the Last Night of the Proms ensures the festival ends with a bang rather than a whimper. In terms of musical imagination, originality, provocation and insight, however, the reverse has long been the case, and the event today does little more than put the shit in …
Proms
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2014: Behzad Ranjbaran – Seemorgh – The Sunrise (European Première) & Jörg Widmann – Flûte en suite & Teufel Amor (UK Premières)
by 5:4Despite BBC Television’s astonishingly stupid recent efforts to reinforce this myopic dogma, new music does not and never has existed in a hermetically sealed, separate space, set apart from the entirety of music that has gone before it. Composers might sometimes wish it did (echoing Beckett’s “All that goes before …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2014: Judith Weir – Day Break Shadows Flee (World Première); Zhou Long – Postures (European Première); John Adams – Saxophone Concerto (UK Première)
by 5:4The latest round of Proms premières got one thinking about the relationship between expectation/innovation and engagement. It was Judith Weir‘s new work that got this particular ball rolling around the mind. A composer already at the less adventurous end of the new music spectrum, in recent years her music has …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2014: Haukur Tómasson – Magma; Jukka Tiensuu – Voice verser (UK Premières)
by 5:4Nothing remotely ordinary, it often seems, can come from Scandinavia. This notion was emphatically corroborated at the Proms in the recent pair of UK premières from Iceland’s Haukur Tómasson and Finland’s Jukka Tiensuu. i can’t help wondering whether they succeeded as strongly as they did in part for essentially the …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2014: Ayal Adler – Resonating Sounds & Kareem Roustom – Ramal (UK Premières)
by 5:4Last week’s visit to the Proms by Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra brought first UK performances of works by two composers of Middle Eastern descent. Ayal Adler and Kareem Roustom, born in Jerusalem and Syria respectively, opted for compositional approaches that in some ways could be described as opposite. Adler, coming …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2014: Brett Dean – Electric Preludes; Bernard Rands – Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (UK Premières); Benedict Mason – Meld (World Première)
by 5:4New works at the Proms regularly come in the form of concertos, violin and piano continuing to be represented most. The planned performance of Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes (a work i’d been very much looking forward to) on 7 August was unfortunately cancelled due to soloist Leila …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2014: Simon Holt – Morpheus Wakes (UK Première); Jonathan Dove – Gaia Theory; Gabriel Prokofiev – Violin Concerto ‘1914’ (World Premières)
by 5:4The three Proms premières given at the end of last month make for an interesting comparison, with regard to the relationship between material and intention. There was no little weight being hefted around; Jonathan Dove‘s Gaia Theory aspired to James Lovelock’s hypothesis of the same name, concerning ideas of ‘self regulation’ in …
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In the wake of John Tavener‘s death in November last year, more mainstream music festivals have been rather tripping over themselves to offer posthumous tributes; the Cheltenham Festival devoted two concerts to his music last month, and the Proms has done likewise, including the world premières of two of Tavener’s …
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Religion is for many the place where peace meets its end, falling at the hands of inharmonious ideologies in the hearts and minds of their most violent advocates. On the one hand, the claim that religion—one or many—is directly to blame for most of the innumerable wars and conflicts that …
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The first of this year’s Proms premières came from Chinese composer Qigang Chen, with a new trumpet concerto for Alison Balsom. Inspirationally, the title of the work, Joie éternelle, stems from an acknowledged act of nostalgia on Chen’s part, referencing a melody of the same name from the Kunqu operatic …
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20th CenturyAnniversariesBlasts from the Past
Blasts from the Past: György Ligeti – Poème symphonique
by 5:4A couple of days ago marked the eighth anniversary of the death of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. To mark the event, and also begin a new occasional series on 5:4, i’d like to take a brief look back at one of the more enigmatic works of Ligeti’s career. Poème symphonique …
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It’s back! This afternoon (at precisely 2pm, following a brief period of something not entirely unlike hype) the Proms 2014 season was revealed. Having pored over the details, what it promises in the way of new music is characterised as much by safety as it is by generosity. Discounting the …
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All good things etc., and this year it fell to composer Anna Clyne—and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop—to get underway the biggest party-masquerading-as-a-concert of them all, the Last Night of the Proms. In calling her short work Masquerade, Clyne is presumably alluding chiefly to the carnival atmosphere …
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The penultimate première of this year’s Proms almost didn’t happen last Thursday, when two of the trio of percussionists failed to turn up, resulting in seven or eight rather tense minutes while presumably a host of minions dashed about behind the scenes attempting to find and drag them onstage. It …
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What is this “I”: is it my physical presence, is it the temporality in which I stand and pass away, is there an independence of my thoughts from that which I am, or is my entire being merely a fiction of me myself? This metaphysical conundrum is the starting point …
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Last Wednesday’s world première of Param Vir‘s new Proms commission, Cave of Luminous Mind, gave particular pause for thought in light of its position in the season. Twice recently we have been presented by works from composers of Indian descent (Nishat Khan and Naresh Sohal), works seeking at least in …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2013: John Woolrich / Tansy Davies – Variations on an Elizabethan Theme (World Premières)
by 5:4Last Saturday’s Proms matinee focused on a work created 60 years ago to mark the Queen’s coronation. Instigated by Benjamin Britten, he and five other composers each wrote a variation for string orchestra based on the Irish tune ‘Sellenger’s Round’; titled Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, the complete suite was …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2013: Frederic Rzewski – Piano Concerto (World Première); Gerald Barry – No other people. (UK Première)
by 5:4Prophets, visionaries, seers, they’re an acquired taste, are they not? Often they get relegated to an idealistic niche characterised as “head in the clouds”—yet a more careful survey reveals that most luminaries are among the most earthly-wise and practical of people. This difficult-to-digest paradox coloured much of the music at …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2013: Sofia Gubaidulina – The Rider on the White Horse (UK Première)
by 5:4The beauty and diversity of nature has been a recurring theme in this year’s new music at the Proms, whereas religious sentiment has been entirely absent—until, that is, last Tuesday’s performance of Sofia Gubaidulina‘s The Rider on the White Horse. Culled and reworked from her 2002 oratorio St John Easter …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2013: Nishat Khan/Pete Stacey – The Gate of the Moon (Sitar Concerto No. 1) (World Première)
by 5:4It’s interesting to be considering the next Proms première in the wake of having seen, last night, Bollywood’s latest blockbuster offering, Chennai Express. Bollywood’s glory—and at its best, that is definitely the right word—is in its uniquely convoluted appropriation and reinvention of western tropes, served in a form that, to …