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Advent Calendar

  • Advent Calendar

    Helmut Lachenmann – Marche Fatale

    by 5:4 December 25, 2022 • 05:00
    December 25, 2022 • 05:00

    SEASONS GREETINGS! For Christmas Day i’m bringing my Advent Calendar to a close with one of the most wonderfully perverse orchestral works i’ve heard in recent years, Helmut Lachenmann‘s Marche Fatale. It began life as a piece for solo piano, premièred in 2017, and the orchestral version followed a year…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Justė Janulytė – Unanime (World Première, first version)

    by 5:4 December 24, 2022 • 05:00
    December 24, 2022 • 05:00

    One of my personal highlights of this year’s Huddersfield Festival was the performance of Justė Janulytė‘s 2020 work for 8 trumpets, Unanime. Composed for Marco Blaauw’s Monochrome Project, the piece exists in two versions: the first, with a single climax, lasts 15 minutes; the second, with two climaxes (one muted,…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Maurice Ravel (orch. Colin Matthews) – Oiseaux tristes (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 23, 2022 • 05:00
    December 23, 2022 • 05:00

    In last year’s Advent Calendar i featured an arrangement of one of Ravel’s piano works by Boulez; this year i’m exploring one by UK composer Colin Matthews. Ravel completed his five-movement piano suite Miroirs in 1905. He subsequently orchestrated two of the movements himself, Une barque sur l’océan and Alborada…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Elizabeth Ogonek – Sleep & Unremembrance (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 22, 2022 • 05:00
    December 22, 2022 • 05:00

    For today’s Advent Calendar work i’m returning to one of the composers who stood out most prominently among the premières at last year’s Proms festival. Elizabeth Ogonek‘s Cloudline wasn’t just one of my own favourites, you evidently felt exactly the same way, as the work almost came top of the…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Michael Finnissy – Polskie tańce ludowe (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 21, 2022 • 05:00
    December 21, 2022 • 05:00

    Michael Finnissy’s Polskie tańce ludowe (Polish folk dances) have had multiple lives. Their origins are in a volume of Polish folk music given to Finnissy as a child by his godfather, Peter Klos. Finnissy recently recalled to me that … he served with the Polish Airforce, he was not a…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Linda Catlin Smith – Wilderness (European Première)

    by 5:4 December 20, 2022 • 05:00
    December 20, 2022 • 05:00

    Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a beautiful, contemplative orchestral work by Canada-based composer Linda Catlin Smith. Wilderness was composed in 2005, and while it would be inaccurate to call it a work for violin and orchestra (still less a concerto), a solo violin has a role distinct from the…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Francisco López – Untitled, Live at Cafe Oto (#2) (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 19, 2022 • 05:00
    December 19, 2022 • 05:00

    Francisco López‘s second live performance at Cafe Oto, in March 2015, makes a strong contrast to the first (featured earlier this month); where that had harnessed electronic elements largely devoid of referential qualities, this piece focuses on a juxtaposition of sounds that are clearly derived from (or intended to imitate)…

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  • Advent Calendar

    Rolf Wallin – Soundspeed

    by 5:4 December 18, 2022 • 05:00
    December 18, 2022 • 05:00

    i’m returning to the world of the miniature today, with Rolf Wallin‘s 60-second orchestral piece Soundspeed. There’s only so much you can expect from a minute’s worth of music, but i like what Wallin manages to cram into this tiny piece.

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Mica Levi – BOUND. 9 Minuets (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 17, 2022 • 05:00
    December 17, 2022 • 05:00

    Today’s work in the 5:4 Advent Calendar is a typically leftfield piece by British musician Mica Levi. Levi’s music encompasses the deep and the trivial, the profound and the nonsensical, sometimes simultaneously. Their work BOUND. 9 Minuets, for two small snare drums & ensemble, tends more towards the latter than…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Anna Fišere – Radices (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 16, 2022 • 05:00
    December 16, 2022 • 05:00

    One of the more memorable works performed at the inaugural Baltic Music Days in 2020 was Mundus Invisibilis by Latvian composer Anna Fišere (formerly Ķirse). That piece was concerned with fungal mycelium, and her earlier work Radices for 8 singers and electronics, composed in 2018, is similarly rooted in the…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Shiori Usui – Particles (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 15, 2022 • 05:00
    December 15, 2022 • 05:00

    Particles by Japanese composer Shiori Usui consists of four minutes of wild textural mayhem. The title suggests it’s all going to be about light, tiny impacts, and that is how the work begins. However, this opening chorus of skitterings is soon supplanted by the significant heft of what sound like…

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  • Advent Calendar

    Aphex Twin (arr. Caleb Burhans) – Blue Calx

    by 5:4 December 14, 2022 • 05:00
    December 14, 2022 • 05:00

    In last year’s Advent Calendar i included Patrick Nunn’s instrumental arrangement of the Aphex Twin track ‘Nannou’; today i’m featuring another arrangement, this time Caleb Burhans’ acoustic take on ‘Blue Calx’, the only track on Aphex Twin’s classic 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II to have an explicit title…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Britta Byström – Der Vogel der Nacht (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 13, 2022 • 05:00
    December 13, 2022 • 05:00

    The work i’m featuring today in my Advent Calendar is one that takes its starting point from one of my favourite pieces of music, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. One of Mahler’s most epic symphonies, in the fourth movement the music turns inward, into a place of mystery, darkness, night and…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Sasha Scott – Nerve (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 12, 2022 • 05:00
    December 12, 2022 • 05:00

    In 2019, Sasha Scott won the senior category of the BBC Young Composer of the Year, with an electroacoustic work titled Humans May Not Apply. The following year she composed a new work for the BBC Concert Orchestra, Nerve, though due to the pandemic its performance was delayed until August…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Milton Babbitt – An Encore (European Première)

    by 5:4 December 11, 2022 • 05:00
    December 11, 2022 • 05:00

    There are some composers whose music i keep coming back to not out of love but with the attitude of a nutcracker, trying once again to break through its tough, tenacious surface. i don’t know Milton Babbitt‘s music well (as i admitted when noting his centenary a few years back),…

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  • Advent Calendar

    Onutė Narbutaitė – Vasara

    by 5:4 December 10, 2022 • 05:00
    December 10, 2022 • 05:00

    Today’s featured work is one for the southern hemisphere, now entering its warmest months of the year. Composed in 1991, Lithuanian composer Onutė Narbutaitė‘s Vasara is a miniature choral homage to the season of summer. The words, written by the composer, have a nostalgic flavour, looking back at the experiences…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Francisco López – Untitled, Live at Cafe Oto (#1) (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 9, 2022 • 05:00
    December 9, 2022 • 05:00

    Today’s Advent Calendar piece is the first of two live, untitled performances given by Spanish sound artist Francisco López at Cafe Oto in London in March 2015. The performances were originally presented in four channels, with members of the audience invited to wear eye masks in order to plunge themselves…

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  • Advent Calendar

    Tõnis Kaumann – Ave Maria

    by 5:4 December 8, 2022 • 05:00
    December 8, 2022 • 05:00

    For those of a Catholic persuasion, today is one of the days devoted to Mary in the liturgical calendar, so it’s as good a time as any to feature in my Advent Calendar a setting of Ave Maria by Estonian composer Tõnis Kaumann. A few years ago i explored Kaumann’s…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Chaya Czernowin – On the Face of the Deep (UK Première)

    by 5:4 December 7, 2022 • 05:00
    December 7, 2022 • 05:00

    Though i don’t (any longer) have a religious bone in my body, i’m nonetheless drawn to the paintings of John Martin, particularly his vast, frenzied depictions of some of the more apocalyptic events described in the Bible. i find myself thinking of Martin’s paintings while listening to On the Face…

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  • Advent Calendar

    Naomi Pinnock – everything does change

    by 5:4 December 6, 2022 • 05:00
    December 6, 2022 • 05:00

    “Everything changes it is extraordinary how everything does change.” That short quotation from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography has provided Naomi Pinnock with two separate titles for two related works. Everything changes for viola and cello was composed in 2011 as the accompaniment to a short film by Pavla Scerankova titled…

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5:4
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