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Festivals

  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2022 (Part 4)

    by 5:4 May 9, 2022 • 09:52
    May 9, 2022 • 09:52

    A disconcerting aspect of some of the pieces performed at this year’s Estonian Music Days was the extent to which their material, language and / or behaviour was obviously begged, borrowed and / or stolen from heavily-worn musical conventions, to the point of outright cliché. This was especially apparent in…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2022 (Interlude / Part 3)

    by 5:4 May 5, 2022 • 05:00
    May 5, 2022 • 05:00

    In addition to conventional acoustic and electronic music, there was the opportunity to explore a variety of audiovisual work during my time in Tallinn. This was primarily due to COMMUTE, a fringe festival run by the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, with late evening concerts each day, after the…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 May 2, 2022 • 05:00
    May 2, 2022 • 05:00

    The smallest-scale events at this year’s Estonian Music Days were a pair of chamber concerts at each end of the festival. Irina Zahharenkova’s keyboard recital at the Arvo Pärt Centre encompassed extremes of musical invention. The most egregious were two works dating from the early 1990s by a Russian guitarist…

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  • AnnouncementsFestivals

    Gigs, gigs, gigs: Proms 2022

    by 5:4 April 29, 2022 • 09:59
    April 29, 2022 • 09:59

    This year’s Proms season has been announced in the last few days, and alongside all the standard fare, there’s the usual small smattering of contemporary music to get mildly excited about. Scanning through the programme, the most immediate thing that leapt out was familiarity, even predictability, the festival in general…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2022 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 April 28, 2022 • 16:51
    April 28, 2022 • 16:51

    Even before my plane touched down at Tallinn airport, i knew that this year’s Estonian Music Days was going to feel a bit different. Last year marked the 20th anniversary of Estonia’s independence from Soviet occupation, and one of the effects of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is that Tallinn…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Borealis 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 April 2, 2022 • 12:27
    April 2, 2022 • 12:27

    i wrote in Part 1 about the warm, inviting and relaxing atmosphere that pervaded each of the concerts at Borealis 2022. Establishing this kind of environment for audiences is vital, for two important reasons. First, because any festival that claims itself to be, as Borealis explicitly does, “for experimental music”…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Borealis 2022 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 March 31, 2022 • 14:48
    March 31, 2022 • 14:48

    Even at the first concert of the first day of Borealis 2022, i was realising how much the festival felt different from the norm. i go to a lot of festivals (notwithstanding the upheavals of the last two years), and for the most part, aside from cultural distinctions, they’re all…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 March 14, 2022 • 19:34
    March 14, 2022 • 19:34

    As i mentioned previously, the majority of the music i heard at this year’s Dark Music Days fell somewhere between emotional allusion and full-on abstraction. In many ways it was the most abstract music that made some of the strongest and most long-lasting impressions, primarily because of the composers’ focus…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2022 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 March 11, 2022 • 13:15
    March 11, 2022 • 13:15

    Postponed from its usual position in late January to early March due to last-minute Covid restriction shenanigans, Iceland’s Dark Music Days festival was therefore not quite so dark as usual. All the same, it was hardly the Light Music Days, and in any case Mother Nature was seemingly more determined…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2021 (Part 4)

    by 5:4 November 30, 2021 • 11:18
    November 30, 2021 • 11:18

    There’s not a lot left to say about HCMF 2021. In previous instalments i mentioned how continuity, often in tandem with lyricism, played a major role in the music that made the deepest and most long-lasting impression. But from a listening perspective, every piece in every concert at this year’s…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2021 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 November 29, 2021 • 15:46
    November 29, 2021 • 15:46

    One of my recurring trains of thought during HCMF 2021 was concerned with the notion of continuity. This was, very simply, due to the fact that all of the best things i heard at the festival had an incredibly clear, logical sense running through them that, regardless of their inner…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2021 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 November 28, 2021 • 13:13
    November 28, 2021 • 13:13

    HCMF always has its fair share of unconventional, genre-defying performances, and this year was no exception. Among the more unusual was Eupepsia/Dyspepsia devised by Austrian composer Eva Reiter. Taking the form of a concert-cum-lecture (or possibly lecture-cum-concert), the focus of the work was on the socio-cultural effects wrought on Bolivia…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2021 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 November 26, 2021 • 16:55
    November 26, 2021 • 16:55

    Though this year it only lasted five days instead of ten, i came away from the 2021 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with the distinct impression that, somehow, the usual quantity of music had been compressed into a reduced time frame. That’s not, mercifully, because of any attempt to shoehorn many…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    Ultima 2021 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 October 4, 2021 • 15:59
    October 4, 2021 • 15:59

    In addition to the soundwalks, installations, music theatre, performance art and electroacoustic shenanigans, Ultima 2021 also had its fair share of more conventional ensemble concerts, which took place in two Oslo churches. The beautiful Tøyen Kirke played host to two of Norway’s most prominent new music ensembles, asamisimasa and Cikada.

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    Ultima 2021 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 October 1, 2021 • 14:29
    October 1, 2021 • 14:29

    Not everything i heard at Ultima 2021 was bound up in convolutions of meaning. Ryoji Ikeda‘s forays into the world of percussion (which i previously explored in 2018) are a sidestep away from his more central work in multi-layered representations and interpretations of data, instead concerned much more directly with…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    Ultima 2021 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 September 29, 2021 • 11:24
    September 29, 2021 • 11:24

    The saying goes that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, but in the case of the Ultima festival in Oslo, the latter half of which i experienced last week, i don’t think i truly realised how much i’d missed contemporary music festivals until i was back in…

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  • CommentFestivalsPremières

    Proms 2021: the premières – how you voted

    by 5:4 September 28, 2021 • 11:22
    September 28, 2021 • 11:22

    Two weeks have passed since this year’s Proms season came to an end, so it’s time to take a look at how you responded to each of the new works in the annual 5:4 Proms première polls. i want to thank all of you who voted; there was a healthy-sized…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2021: Gity Razaz – Mother (World Première)

    by 5:4 September 12, 2021 • 12:38
    September 12, 2021 • 12:38

    What is there left to say about the Last Night of the Proms, a.k.a “Now That’s What I Call Classical Music”? Less a concert than a party, for many years now the occasion has begun with a première, presumably intended to act as a champagne cork ‘pop’ to get things…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2021: Unsuk Chin – Subito con forza (UK Première)

    by 5:4 September 8, 2021 • 15:27
    September 8, 2021 • 15:27

    The penultimate première of this year’s Proms took place yesterday evening, in the form of a short, entertaining concert-opener courtesy of South Korean composer Unsuk Chin. Composed last year as part of the commemorations marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Chin’s Subito con forza flirts with a number of…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2021: Grace-Evangeline Mason – The Imagined Forest (World Première); Samy Moussa – A Globe Itself Infolding (UK Première)

    by 5:4 September 7, 2021 • 14:05
    September 7, 2021 • 14:05

    As i may have said previously, i have a love-hate relationship with film scores. Being something of a movie addict, i’m obviously encountering them all the time, and at their best, i adore how they don’t merely accompany the on-screen drama but contain their own distinctive parallel narrative, interesting in…

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5:4
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