• About
    • Other writings
  • Patrons
  • The Lists
    • Listening History
    • Complete List of Ratings
    • Compositions explored on 5:4
    • Albums and EPs reviewed on 5:4
    • Festivals reviewed on 5:4
    • Best Albums of the Years
    • The Proms premières – Poll results
  • The Dialogues
  • Mixtapes
    • Mixtapes
    • The Isolation Mixtapes
    • Mystery Mixtapes
    • Podcasts
  • Contact
    • Contact Form
    • Submission Contact Form
5:4
Category:

Festivals

  • FestivalsPremières

    Ultima 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 October 2, 2023 • 13:47
    October 2, 2023 • 13:47

    Oslo’s annual contemporary music festival Ultima is currently in something of a transition, between outgoing artistic director Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen and incoming Heloisa Amaral, who took the helm in February this year. On the one hand, what i experienced during my three days there was broadly comparable to previous years, …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2023 (Part 4)

    by 5:4 June 3, 2023 • 05:00
    June 3, 2023 • 05:00

    The most overwhelming event at this year’s Estonian Music Days festival was a concert at the Arvo Pärt Centre given by soprano Iris Oja, percussionists Vambola Krigul and Lauri Metsvahi, and Tammo Sumera on electronics. In some respects it feels difficult to write about this concert, as the scope, depth …

    Read more
    2 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2023 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 May 30, 2023 • 09:27
    May 30, 2023 • 09:27

    Despite the quantity of abstract music featured at this year’s Estonian Music Days, it wasn’t surprising – with the theme “soul” looming over the Tallinn part of the festival – that many composers avoided abstraction and sought to create more tangible, referential and / or emotionally-charged music. Indeed, this was …

    Read more
    2 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2023 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 May 23, 2023 • 11:53
    May 23, 2023 • 11:53

    Surely the most completely abstract music i heard at this year’s Estonian Music Days was Blue Moon Station by Latvian composer Alise Rancāne. The piece involved all six members of the Ensemble of the Estonian Electronic Music Society (EMA) huddled around a computer keyboard playing a video game projected on …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 May 20, 2023 • 15:19
    May 20, 2023 • 15:19

    In previous accounts of my annual pilgrimage to Eesti Muusika Päevad, the Estonian Music Days, i’ve tended to remark on the festival’s insistence on a theme, usually in regard to how innocuous or irrelevant it seemed in relation to the actual concerts. This year, the Tallinn portion of the festival …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Forum Wallis 2023 update

    by 5:4 May 9, 2023 • 11:12
    May 9, 2023 • 11:12

    An occupational hazard with writing about music festivals is the inability of readers to be able to experience any of the music for themselves. However, in the case of this year’s Forum Wallis festival, three of the most interesting performances have been uploaded to Javier Hagen and Ulrike Mayer-Spohn‘s YouTube …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Only Connect 2023 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 April 25, 2023 • 08:06
    April 25, 2023 • 08:06

    Very few performances at Only Connect 2023 failed to impress. Among the exceptions was Caminante by Michael Pisaro, premièred on the opening night by Trondheim Sinfonietta with bassist Michael Francis Duch. Though the work began well, establishing a nicely darkened texture that became almost gritty and dirty, as soon as …

    Read more
    1 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Only Connect 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 April 22, 2023 • 09:57
    April 22, 2023 • 09:57

    There can’t be many festivals that have as their name a direct command to the audience: Only Connect. This was my third time at Norway’s Only Connect festival, held this year in Trondheim, and each time i’ve attended there’s been a keen emphasis on the importance and necessity, from compositional, …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Forum Wallis 2023 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 March 22, 2023 • 08:23
    March 22, 2023 • 08:23

    The most entertaining event at Forum Wallis 2023 was ‘Adventurous Sounds’, a concert billed as being “New Music for and with children” as part of a project aimed at introducing contemporary music to young people, which also extends to in-school activities. One of the most hilarious compositions i’ve ever heard, …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Forum Wallis 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 March 16, 2023 • 09:34
    March 16, 2023 • 09:34

    It doesn’t take long to get the measure of a new music festival – aims, outlook, characteristics – but that doesn’t mean it becomes predictable. i’ve found this to be more than usually true of Forum Wallis, which remains one of the most remote festivals i’ve had the pleasure of …

    Read more
    1 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2023 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 February 11, 2023 • 19:10
    February 11, 2023 • 19:10

    The majority of the concerts at this year’s Dark Music Days were focused on chamber music. The most leftfield of these came courtesy of Trio Isak, in a concert titled ‘Ballet on the Moon’. That title in part derived from the opening piece on the programme, Daníel Bjarnason‘s White Flags, …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2023 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 February 7, 2023 • 16:34
    February 7, 2023 • 16:34

    Larger-scale works featured in several Dark Music Days events. One of the toughest to engage with was given by Caput Ensemble, a concert marred by the yawningly awful Polo by Simon Mawhinney, a quarter of an hour’s worth of relentless, faceless, arbitrary blarney. Veronique Vaka‘s Holos was marginally more interesting, …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 February 3, 2023 • 11:05
    February 3, 2023 • 11:05

    While it’s normal to feel a sense of familiarity returning to a festival year after year, it was stronger than usual at the 2023 Dark Music Days in Reykjavík since it was only 10 months since last year’s festival, which had been delayed due to the pandemic. It also served …

    Read more
    1 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 December 1, 2022 • 15:24
    December 1, 2022 • 15:24

    This year’s composer in residence at HCMF, Lisa Streich, was represented by an appropriately large number of performances, allowing for a pretty deep dive into her musical thinking. If i say that a lot of what i heard of Streich’s music was more intriguing than immediately enjoyable, i need to …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2022 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 November 30, 2022 • 14:27
    November 30, 2022 • 14:27

    People doing interesting things to objects doesn’t necessarily create interesting music. Can we agree on that? i don’t think that’s a particularly outrageous thing to say, though there were a number of times during my six days at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival when i found myself wondering otherwise. …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Ultima 2022 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 September 29, 2022 • 05:00
    September 29, 2022 • 05:00

    i’m concluding my coverage of this year’s Ultima festival with something that – over a week since it took place – i’m still grappling with in terms of what i experienced as well as, quite simply, what to call it. On 17 September a marathon was being run through the …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • FestivalsPremières

    Ultima 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 September 26, 2022 • 10:26
    September 26, 2022 • 10:26

    It’s reasonable to expect extreme variety and diversity at Ultima, though many of the more conventional concert events i experienced at this year’s festival were a surprisingly mixed bag, qualitatively speaking. The most taxing was unfortunately a concert celebrating the award of this year’s Arne Nordheim prize to Jan Martin …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • CommentFestivalsPremières

    Proms 2022: the premières – how you voted

    by 5:4 September 24, 2022 • 10:19
    September 24, 2022 • 10:19

    It’s been a little over two weeks since the BBC bafflingly decided, rather than to channel the Last Night of the Proms (the UK’s most shamelessly jingoistic occasion) into an evening both celebrating the life and commemorating the death of the Queen, that they would instead simply pull the plug. …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • Festivals

    Ultima 2022 (Part 1)

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

    Within the context of new music festivals, it can be rather too easy to assume that installations are a kind of secondary activity, even an optional extra, something to check out if you’ve got some spare time between the really important stuff, i.e. the actual concerts. This misconception is perhaps …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • 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 …

    Read more
    0 FacebookTwitterPinterestRedditEmail
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • …
  • 23

Subscribe to 5:4

World New Music Days 2025 Nils Henrik Asheim: Lydkilder Sound and Image: Aesthetics and Practices Music Beyond Airports: appraising ambient music Simon Cummings | 間 Studies vol. 6

  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • Rss
  • Mixcloud
Footer Logo

© Simon Cummings

5:4
  • About
    • Other writings
  • Patrons
  • The Lists
    • Listening History
    • Complete List of Ratings
    • Compositions explored on 5:4
    • Albums and EPs reviewed on 5:4
    • Festivals reviewed on 5:4
    • Best Albums of the Years
    • The Proms premières – Poll results
  • The Dialogues
  • Mixtapes
    • Mixtapes
    • The Isolation Mixtapes
    • Mystery Mixtapes
    • Podcasts
  • Contact
    • Contact Form
    • Submission Contact Form