Contemporary music festivals often feel the need to impose a theme on the proceedings, but in the case of this year’s World New Music Days, hosted in Portugal, it was less a theme than a rallying cry. “Thirst for Change” was the phrase hanging over the festival, though as with all thematic impositions, the extent to which it was echoed or ignored by the music varied greatly.
Choices of curation at WNMD are practically arcane in the intricate rules that must be followed by each host country, but one of the more striking – and, i imagine, optional – decisions made by the Portuguese team was to include a number of works by well-established (and, in most cases, well-dead) composers. i mention this at the start, partly because these works were featured from the beginning through the first half of the festival, but also because of the effect their inclusion had on everything else that followed. As i wrote last year, WNMD is unique among festivals inasmuch as its gives a curious kind of portrait of the current state of global contemporary music. This portrait is filtered, twice: first, by each country’s decisions about which works are worthy for consideration; second, by the host country’s decisions about which works to include. These choices are expanded somewhat by the fact that any individual composer can submit their own music for consideration. This is my third time at WNMD, and it’s become increasingly clear that the portrait of new music that emerges is complex, reflecting most strongly the predilections of the host, while also hinting at prevailing tendencies within the zeitgeist.
The choice to include works by major figures, though a surprise, was in hindsight a good one, as it shone a strong, starkly revealing light on the submitted music, with the result that, before three of the 27 concerts had finished, i found myself wondering (and angrily scribbling in my notebook), “when did contemporary music become so fucking polite?” The context, and in part the trigger, for this question / accusation were performances on the festival’s opening night of Claude Vivier‘s Lonely Child and György Ligeti‘s Mysteries of the Macabre. Both stunning pieces in very different ways, they were given exceptional performances by the sensation that is soprano Camila Mandillo, revealing utterly different sides to her personality.
The Vivier was genuinely uncanny. Though rooted in melody there was the continual sense of a song both deeply urgent and a struggle to articulate, but always beautiful, weird and, ultimately, transcendent. The Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Pedro Neves, surrounded and suffused Mandillo with a dazzling array of soft chittering and oblique chords like shafts of light, with gongs and bass drum lending ritualistic weight. The Ligeti could not have been more of a counterpoint, made appropriately mischievous, even borderline demented by Mandillo, whose stream of theatrical, hyperexpressive consciousness was wonderfully controlled yet continually indicated chaos was lurking at the fringes.
These breathtaking pieces, demonstrations of the most far-reaching originality, set the bar exceptionally high. This was extended when WNMD took an excursion north to Porto, Portugal’s second city. Liza Lim‘s Fatimah / Jubilation of Flowers was given an enigmatic performance by the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, bringing to the fore its opulent mix of familiarity and strangeness, while the following day, Remix Ensemble under Ilan Volkov gave a dazzling account of Olga Neuwirth‘s Vampyrotheone, throwing all of us into a disorienting world of jostling instrumental factions, push-pull energy (by turns projected and introverted), riddled with impishness. The conclusion of works by major composers came in a triple-bill Piano Marathon back in Lisbon, where Berio‘s Sequenza IV, Boulez‘s 12 Notations and Nono‘s … sofferte onde serene … were featured, one in each concert, each work testifying to the uniquely fervid creativity that makes their music still sound disarmingly fresh, vibrant and powerful today, decades after they were composed.
Heard in the context – and, for the most part, in the wake – of these works, it was disheartening to hear just how many of the submitted composers had retreated away from such strong, forthright, dauntless compositional substance and conviction, in favour of weak, clichéd platitudes. On the one hand, it felt odd that a festival proclaiming “Thirst for Change” would see fit to include music embodying anything but a desire for change, wanting instead to cleave to and hide in delusions of safe, sonic comfort. Yet perhaps these works’ impersonal oversimplification and lack of ambition are a sad but true reflection of what’s happening in at least some parts of new music at the moment. That they’re present is a surprise to no-one; that they’re a trend (if they are) would be a whole lot more worrying, in which case “Thirst for Change” could hardly be more a desperately apt sentiment, perhaps even more broad in its outlook than the Portuguese curators had envisaged.
Having made such a strong impression in the Vivier and Ligeti, Camila Mandillo was no less outstanding in a concert she gave alongside pianist João Casimiro Almeida in Lisbon’s elegant São Luiz Teatro Municipal. Susan Pennefather Gray by Jim O’Leary (Canada) established a lovely duo relationship: Almeida an abstract but emotionally-charged presence, Mandillo passionate but regular, their respective material often out of step. Its mesmeric effect was reinforced by notes from inside the piano, suggesting interior intimacy. A Maior Tortura by António Pinho Vargas (Portugal), despite a basic musical language and essentially static harmony (over a low piano drone), became a context for Mandillo’s voice to positively sear from the stage, her white hot intensity channelled into laser-like focus.
Almeida left the stage in Ciclo Shakespeare – Since Brass nor Stone by Isabel Soveral (Portugal), Mandillo surrounded now by electronics that established a similar relationship as Vargas and O’Leary. The electronics’ cool indifference formed a neutral atmosphere for Mandillo’s rich, hot delivery, in which every word felt vital, packed with meaning. As if in acknowledgement of this, the electronics sounded increasingly sympathetic, becoming a kind of ‘outside time’ resonance, anticipating, reinforcing and echoing the words.
It’s impossible not to mention the two concerts given by Coro Juvenil da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal’s answer to the Kids from Fame. Their reimaginings of choral works into fully-choreographed, song and dance dramas took some getting used to, but it was impossible not to be staggered by the quality, imagination, and indeed the stamina of their performances. One obvious drawback was the way very stylistically diverse music started to sound weirdly similar, their distinctions reduced by the increasingly apparent homogeneity of the physical language on stage. Nonetheless, when the music played directly into their mode of expression the results were spectacular. Primitive Music by Jukka Linkola (Finland) was the most telling example; indeed it was hard to imagine his folk-infused songs being performed without these playful and ritualistic movements.
The most ambitious vocal work featured in WNMD 2025 was by one of Portugal’s foremost musical practitioners, and one of the main curators of the festival, Miguel Azguime. A Laugh to Cry, described by Azguime as an “OP-ERA”, is a 70-minute multimedia work conceived in collaboration with his wife, Paula Azguime. It was a lot to take in, and at the time felt seriously overwhelming, but in a way that consistently invited engagement, and – i was going to say i’ve been contemplating it ever since, but it would be truer to say that it’s burrowed deeply into my consciousness.
The work is dark and, in a sense, apocalyptic, inasmuch as it reflects Azguime’s concerns not about the state of the world – this is no mere eco-piece, wringing its hands with tired slogans and vague, generic laments – but about ourselves, our nature, our perceptions, our understanding, our behaviour, our very quiddity. Its tone of heightened extremity, embracing absurdist elements, seemed an obvious, unavoidable consequence of sheer desperation (and, perhaps, terror). That disquieting title, A Laugh to Cry, hung over every moment of the work, making its eye-popping theatrics and convoluted musical-lexical narrative feel paradoxically all the more sombre and provocative as it continued. By the end i honestly felt i’d experienced something akin to a horror film.
Yet the conclusion of the work is not fatalistic or doom-laden. On the contrary, it could hardly be more radical. We arrive at a place of dreams and wonder, and while i initially thought this was implying an imagined conclusion – a kind of tragic reverie of what might have been – Azguime was asserting something much more challenging and far-reaching. He directly invoked rebirth (“Wrapped in a shroud changing us into chrysalis”), indicating this is not about mere change but a complete metamorphic reconstruction of our thinking and understanding from the molecular level up. Everything familiar collapses, language itself dissolves, passing through cyberpunk-like anti-/post-meaning to become something akin to the chrysalidal soup. Ambiguity became unavoidable, even essential, in all this; indeed, the work’s closing lines cheekily played this up: “That’s clear! That’s clear? Dark’s clear!”
Yet that final line hints at a paradoxical illumination – from, of all places, darkness. Darkness as both the state we’ve reached, and the future beyond it, as unknowable to us now as the butterfly is to the caterpillar. As such, Azguime never prescribed a vision of that future; this was a work not of prophecy, but possibility. So there is hope at the end of A Laugh to Cry, but it’s not simple or consoling. It’s the demanding hope – one that must be embodied by us all – of a total metamorphosis of thinking and being. That way, and only that way, our future lies.
A Laugh to Cry is available to watch on YouTube, and the (absolutely vital) libretto can be found on Azguime’s website.
