Advent Calendar

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! i’m bringing my Advent Calendar to a close with a piece that i’ve always shied away from writing about, even though i think it’s one of the truly great orchestral works of the 20th century. Composed in 1997, Harrison Birtwistle‘s Exody looks ahead not only to what was…

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is another focused on the coldness of winter: Öökülm [night frost] for orchestra and electronics by Malle Maltis. In her programme note, Maltis speaks a lot about the destruction caused by cold, and a little about beauty. To an extent this emphasis is mirrored in the…

A couple of days ago we crossed the threshold into winter, so for both today’s and tomorrow’s Advent Calendar pieces i’m exploring music that either invokes or evokes the cold. Invocation first, in the form of Now I’m Nowhere, a work for male voices by Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė. Janulytė…

Despite our highest hopes and expectations, 2021 hasn’t brought any resolution to the world’s ongoing swings between bouts of freedom and restriction in its attempts to mitigate the effects of Covid. i can’t help hearing something of the pent-up frustration caused by this in today’s Advent Calendar piece, Čvor by…

Today’s Advent Calendar door contains a miniature by James Dillon. Similar to Dragonfly, explored during this year’s Lent Series, Charm (2008) is another short piano work composed quickly for a friend. The title is interpretable in a variety of ways (in a pre-concert talk, Dillon even mentioned the charm quark…

For today’s Advent Calendar piece i’m turning to part of a concert given by the choir Vox Clamantis. Originally formed to explore Gregorian chant, while the choir’s repertoire now encompasses ancient and modern, one of the features of their concerts is the way they’re structured as what could be called…

It’s Rebecca Saunders‘ birthday, so behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a short work of hers investigating slide guitar techniques. Composed in 2018, Study For Metal Bottle Necks comes across as rather different in tone from the majority of Saunders’ work. The usual liminal balance between abstraction and emotional heft…

Today’s Advent Calendar work is another fascinating miniature oddity. Maurice Ravel composed Frontispice – his shortest work, consisting of just 15 bars – in June 1918. It was commissioned by the writer and poet Ricciotto Canudo, intended to act as a preface to Canudo’s S.P. 503, Le Poème du Vardar,…

i want to make a bold, seemingly absurd statement about the orchestral work behind today’s Advent Calendar door. The more time i’ve spent with Adagietto by Linda Catlin Smith, the more i’ve perceived it as having no movement in it whatsoever. Let me explain. What i don’t mean is that…

Behind yesterday’s Advent Calendar door was an angel bathed in glory; today, characters and a context rather less salubrious. Broad St. Burlesque is an homage to the street in Birmingham that its composer, Zoe Martlew, not inaccurately describes as “the city’s principal party slag drag”. The piece was commissioned by…

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is a short orchestral work by Deborah Pritchard that takes its inspiration, and its title, from a painting by J. M. W. Turner. The Angel Standing in the Sun dates from relatively late in Turner’s life, being exhibited in 1846 (he died five years later). It’s…

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is one of the most stunning choral works i’ve heard in the last few years. i was fortunate enough to experience the first performance of Helena Tulve’s Nächtliche Gesänge [Night Songs] at the World Music Days in 2019. The two songs use texts from German…

i said at the start of this Advent Calendar that many of the pieces i’d be featuring would be miniatures, but in the case of the piece behind today’s door, technically a complete performance would last 24 hours – or, indeed, could continue endlessly. Renate Fuczik by Peter Ablinger is…

Today’s Advent Calendar work is one of Webernesque miniature proportions. Composed in 1976, Howard Skempton‘s One for the Road for solo accordion is a typically strange piece, full of paradoxes. In a not dissimilar way to a more recent work like Oculus, Skempton’s material is obsessive, cycling around a single…

Though at first glance the music of Aphex Twin might not seem a likely subject for instrumental arrangement, the fact is that his work has attracted this treatment on a number of occasions, usually with surprising success. As far back as 1995, Philip Glass created an outstanding orchestration of the…

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a short electroacoustic work by Bethan Morgan-Williams. The unusual word in the work’s title originates from one of my favourite linguistical sources, the wonderful Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where ‘kenopsia’ (presumably a blending of the Greek words ‘kenosis’, indicating an act of emptying or…

Today’s Advent Calendar offering is an unusual setting of the familiar evening canticles by British composer Judith Bingham. The Anglican service of Choral Evensong is one of the driest and dustiest places for new music to exist in, but whereas the majority of new works written for it fully conform…

Tipping my hat to the fact that this time of year still has, for some people, a connection to things religious, behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a piece from surely the largest cycle of liturgical music ever composed. There are some composers whose music i could write about practically…

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is a beautiful curiosity from 2014 by British composer Max de Wardener. This particular piece, which is untitled, came as the last of three new works by de Wardener performed live at the Southbank Centre in 2014, the first of which was also untitled, while the…

Today is Finnish Independence Day – Hyvää Itsenäisyyspäivää! – and to mark the occasion, behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a short work by Pekka Jalkanen. Kuulen lumen tulon (I hear snow coming) is the first part of Jalkanen’s 2017 triptych November, the three movements of which are for one, two…