Premières

Being the risky, aspiringly cutting edge things that they are, contemporary music festivals always tend to be a bit hit and miss. Very little i heard at Musica Nova 2025 fell into the latter category, but there were a few pieces that slipped through the quality net, being memorable for …

Especially prominent at this year’s Musica Nova festival was the lavish organ in Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo concert hall, unveiled at the start of 2024. The largest modern concert hall organ in the world, its construction was partly made possible by one of Finland’s greatest composers, the late Kaija Saariaho, who in …

i’ve commented before on my general disinterest, and usual disregard, for music festival themes. Musica Nova, Helsinki’s biennial new music extravaganza, opted for ‘together’ as its theme this year, and while that word is sufficiently vague as to have almost no meaning, there were numerous times when that word insinuated …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is an ambitious work by arguably Iceland’s most exciting and radically forward-looking composer of recent years, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. Ecognosis was composed in 2021, a work for bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and various transduced tam-tams. It was intended to be premièred at the Dark …

As i’ve often remarked here (usually in connection with yet another Proms commission) i’m not a fan of contemporary works that seek to ‘respond’ to earlier music. It’s a lazy commissioning approach, usually producing dismal musical results, with the only successes emanating from composers who aren’t particularly fussed about how …

Today’s Advent Calendar piece, Static by Finnish composer Otto Iivari, is technically an audiovisual work. On the two occasions i experienced it, the electronics were presented in conjunction with a tiny TV on a table, displaying a mixture of static and several clear bands that made for a curious relationship …

There are times when it can feel like all contemporary music is split down the middle, with half the composers concerned with frantic activity and movement, and the other half obsessed with the opposite, stillness and immobility. That’s an exaggeration, but there’s more than a little truth to it, and …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a quick bit of fun from British composer Sasha Scott. In 2019, Scott won the Senior category in the BBC Young Composer of the Year Competition with a four-minute orchestral-electronic hybrid titled Humans May Not Apply. It’s a work that both pits the acoustic …

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the shortest works i’ve ever written about. Circumdederunt… in memoriam Rita Wagner by György Kurtág commemorates the Hungarian pianist who died in 2021. Back in 2019, my esteemed blogospherical colleague David Nice mentioned that, after attending a masterclass with Wagner, he had “probably …

One of the more memorable pieces to have been featured in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s annual ‘Shorts’ day (comprising a conveyor belt of miniature concerts, all free to the public) in recent years is Borneo Rivers 2 by Larry Goves. In many ways it’s an unassuming piece: just six …

Nestling behind today’s Advent Calendar door is one of the most remarkable choral works i’ve ever heard, and one that nicely continues the “I am” reflections from yesterday. I Am Calling to You by Maria Kõrvits is a piece for male choir setting a text that, while some attribute to …

When words emerge in Naomi Pinnock‘s music, that’s precisely what they do: emerge. This is achieved partly by paring down the text to a bare essential minimum (The writings of Jakob Br. uses just two words, for example), but more due to the manner in which the words are articulated. …

i’ve heard many wonderful things during my numerous trips to Estonia during the last decade, but today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the most memorable of them all. That may seem strange considering it’s done and dusted in under four minutes, but its brevity is one of the prime …

In my 2022 Advent Calendar, i included Milton Babbitt‘s An Encore, a work i likened to a nut that i kept returning to in order to try new ways to crack it. It’s a similar situation with the work of his i’m featuring today, Autobiography of the Eye for soprano …

In due course, when her music has finally been disseminated and explored properly, and begun to be understood, i’m convinced Gloria Coates will be revealed not only as one of the most fascinating and unique musical voices of modern times, but also as one its most prolific recyclers. In the …

It might seem a bit seasonally early, but the title of today’s Advent Calendar piece is, i suspect, to be taken figuratively. A Forest Reawakens by Electra Perivolaris is a short but potent orchestral work that articulates what one could read as the beginnings of a process of rebirth or …

At the more serious end of the expressive spectrum, there was a lot to take in during my long weekend at this year’s HCMF. It was disappointing to witness, in Ann Cleare‘s TERRARIUM, yet another example of that which has become so prevalent at HCMF in recent years, a multimedia …

Despite the fact that in recent years my general feeling about the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is that it’s become over-familiar and rather predictable – perhaps in need of a fresh start / reboot – my experience during the opening weekend of this year’s HCMF was genuinely unexpected: music that …

As i mentioned previously, the majority of this year’s AFEKT was focused on solo performers – primarily members of Ensemble Musikfabrik – with or without electronics, and these proved to be the strongest events of the festival.

In between the concerts and events at this year’s AFEKT festival, while i was in Tartu i was able to experience the latest venture from Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda. Taking place in the spectacular Estonian National Museum, it comprised a solo exhibition and the world première of a collaboration …