Festivals

For this year’s Proms, Saturday 14 August was designated “Bach Day”, and buried beneath all the BWVs were two new works, by Tarik O’Regan and Alissa Firsova, both works described as ‘arrangements’. O’Regan’s approach, as he saw it, was to tease out ‘hidden’ musical lines within the opening movement of…

A world première from Stephen Montague is always an exciting prospect; while hardly an avant-garde figure, he’s highly unpredictable, and one imagines neither the BBC nor the audience could have envisaged what Montague would ultimately present them with in his new work Wilful Chants, given its first performance by the…

Saturday 7 August’s Proms concert saw the first London performance of Julian Anderson‘s 25-minute Fantasias, a work the National Youth Orchestra has been playing around the country for the last few days, all under the direction of Semyon Bychkov. It’s a work in five movements, the first of which puts…

So, where were we? Ah yes, The Proms; my catchup starts with the concert that took place on Friday 6 August, given by the splendid Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Oliver Knussen‘s Two Organa is a work all the more engaging for its entirely lopsided nature. The first ‘organum’, “Notre Dame…

Another day, another première—this time, it was the first London performance of George Benjamin‘s Duet, for piano and orchestra. In the solo rôle is the unsurpassable Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and he precedes Benjamin’s work with a rendition of György Ligeti‘s “Mesto, rigido e ceremoniale”, the second piece from his enthralling Musica…

Tonight’s Prom concert opened with another London première, Amphitheatre by the Australian composer Brett Dean, who won last year’s prestigious Grawemeyer Prize. The work was composed a decade ago, and appropriately enough was presented this evening by the Australian Youth Orchestra, conducted by the effervescent Mark Elder. The clarity of…

Tonight’s Proms première found itself nestling among an assortment of contemporary works, each vying for attention. Given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen’s direction, the concert opened with Stockhausen‘s 1977 work Jubilee, a 16-minute work hysterically described by some as an ‘overture’ (!!). Of course, it’s nothing of…

This evening’s Proms première came from the pen of one of England’s most intriguing and engaging composers, Simon Holt. Holt’s music betrays little of the generic English sound that plagues so many of the ‘established’ (i.e. published) composers in this land—there’s no trace of the anodyne ‘Faber sound’ here. On…

At tonight’s Proms, almost a year-and-a-half after its world première, Gunther Schuller‘s Where the Word Ends finally found its way to England. It came in the hands of the splendid WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, under the direction of Semyon Bychkov, in his farewell concert with the orchestra he’s faithfully served…