Norway’s annual Borealis festival is more than just a conventional sequence of concerts primarily concerned with the way music sounds. Its aim is evidently toward a more holistic experience, one in which words and visuals are just as important – often, more so – than what we’re hearing. As such,…
Category:
Festivals
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Many thanks to those of you who voted in this year’s Proms première polls. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the turnout was considerably lower than usual, with just under 200 votes cast. Considering that the polls were only open for four weeks this year (instead of the usual 10), and…
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In addition to purely electronic music, this year’s Estonian Music Days once again featured many works melding instrumental and electronic elements. The most potent collision of old and new technology came at the Arvo Pärt Centre on Saturday afternoon, where Anna-Liisa Eller’s kannel (the traditional Estonian instrument, a form of…
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The last couple of years have been unusual for the Estonian Music Days. In 2019 the festival was bloated beyond all recognition and sense due to its assimilation into the World Music Days, making for a horribly hectic and exhausting experience. In 2020, for reasons pandemical, it was the opposite,…
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Like most of this year’s festivals the 2020 Proms was cancelled due to the pandemic, with the BBC offering a selection of ‘greatest hits’ from their Proms archive. That itself was pretty interesting, inasmuch as (just like with their broadcasts of Choral Evensong) it revealed how one year’s festival is…
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As was the case at last year’s festival, most of the concerts at Forum Wallis 2020 focused on works for ensemble. However, while in 2019 the majority of performances involved larger numbers of players, due to the pandemic almost all of the pieces this year were for small chamber groupings,…
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i’ve often likened going to a music festival to an act of pilgrimage, and that feels especially true of Forum Wallis. The two-and-a-half hour train journey from Geneva, edging round the lake before passing by Montreux and on into the heart of the Swiss Alps, feels akin to leaving behind…
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As i mentioned previously, allusions to or evocations of nature were few and far between at this year’s Dark Music Days, indicating the strength and diversity of Iceland’s more searching, abstract approach to composition. This seemed to be precisely the point of Sigurður Árni Jónsson’s Illusion of Explanatory Depth, premièred…
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As an interlude to my coverage of the 2020 Dark Music Days, I have to say something about two artworks that weren’t part of the festival but which contributed significantly to my time in Reykjavík. First is CAT 192, the product of a collaboration in 2013 by composer Hlynur Aðils…
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It no doubt goes without saying that Iceland’s Dark Music Days festival is primarily named for the fact that it takes place in January, when the amount of daylight the country receives is minimal. In a less literal sense, though, musically speaking there’s a lot to be said for listening…
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It’s many, many years since i spent meaningful time in the company of music by Can, so i went to founder member Irmin Schmidt‘s HCMF piano recital last Thursday with precisely no expectations. What transpired was one of the most mesmerising, understated performances that i’ve ever witnessed in St Paul’s…
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Last week i was able to catch a couple of days of the shenanigans going on at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. It was strange not to be doing my usual thing of setting up camp for the whole shebang, but quite apart from it being better than nothing,…
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Being the host nation, music from Norway was especially well-represented at this year’s Nordic Music Days in Bodø. Harnessing the large and impressive organ of Bodø Cathedral, Trond Kverno‘s Triptychon 2 was one of the fieriest things i heard at the festival. We tend to think of toccatas as fast-flowing,…
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Founded in 1888, the annual Nordic Music Days is one of the oldest contemporary music festivals in the world. It’s a peripatetic festival, moving from place to place each year, and for 2019 – surprisingly, for the first time – it moved north of the Arctic Circle, to the small…
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Many thanks to all of you who took part in this year’s Proms première polls. As ever, there was a stark imbalance in the number of votes certain works received, but interestingly, whereas in previous years this tended to be focused on works performed earlier in the festival (since there…
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A golden rule in cinema is “show, don’t tell”, reminding the director it’s invariably more subtle and effective to avoid directly stating the things you want the audience to consider and instead to incorporate them into the medium itself, in the process allowing for a more subtle, rich and wide-ranging…
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When you listen to music what do you see? What does music look like, and what do images sound like? What’s the relationship between musical and visual stimuli? These questions became something of a recurring consideration during the three days of concerts i attended recently during the opening weekend of…
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Perhaps there’ll come a time when it’s possible to mention the Last Night of the Proms without also mentioning, usually in the same sentence, the word ‘tradition’. This is not that time. Whatever you may think of its entrenched traditions, one of the Last Night’s better ones has been the…
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Here we go again. Four of the last premières at the Proms were the product of the festival’s irresistible inclination not to allow composers to just write what they want to write but to force them to ‘respond’ to earlier music. Last year, the most prominent example of this was…
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Any kind of sound processing – human, mechanical, digital – is a response of some kind: taking a signal, possibly analysing it, before doing something with it or to it. The latest new work at the Proms, Jonny Greenwood‘s Horror vacui, takes this as its starting point and modus operandi.…