Premières

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

i’m bringing this year’s Lent Series to a close with another of Gloria Coates‘ remarkable symphonies. Symphony No. 11 was completed in 1999, being a response to a commission from Baron von Freyberg for the Festspiele Europäische Wochen, with the stipulation that the work should be related to Ovid’s recounting…

On 14 January 1953, Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antartica – a symphony derived from his 1948 film score for Scott of the Antarctic – was premièred in Manchester. In the audience that evening was Peter Maxwell Davies who, in 1997, was commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey to create a 50th…

Belgian composer Luc van Hove has, to date, completed four symphonies. The first two (available on a double CD from Megadisc Classics) present a musical attitude that doesn’t just embrace extremes of aggression and tenderness but also moves between them quickly. The first movement of Symphony No. 1 (1989) is…

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,…

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…

Gloria Coates‘ Symphony No. 7 was composed from 1989 to 1990, a highly politically-charged time for those (as Coates was) living in Germany. The Berlin Wall would subsequently fall (on 9 November 1989), but while this promised to usher in a new era of peace, the profound uncertainty that suffused…

Do you now see the possibility of several symphonies? Yes, yes, I do, which just five years ago I would not have seen at all. But I do now feel … that it’s perhaps not too far-fetched to think that possibly I might be able to develop that. Paul Griffiths,…

Laurence Crane‘s music often sounds like a cross between a game and a puzzle, and that’s certainly the case with the next work i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series, his Chamber Symphony No. 2 “The Australian”. That subtitle can be safely ignored; Crane has spoken of enjoying combining abstract…

i headed up the M5 to Birmingham last Sunday for a concert given by the CBSO Youth Orchestra at Symphony Hall. For many people in the audience, i suppose the highlight would have been two works by Berlioz: the concert opened with the Roman Carnival Overture and closed with the…

For this year’s Lent Series i’m turning to a subject that’s one of my personal passions: symphonies. It’s interesting to hear how the word ‘symphony’ has, over time, been defined, consolidated, expanded, elevated, deconstructed, redefined, and along the way become sufficiently loaded that many contemporary composers choose to avoid both…

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,…

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,…

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…

One of my personal highlights of this year’s Huddersfield Festival was the performance of Justė Janulytė‘s 2020 work for 8 trumpets, Unanime. Composed for Marco Blaauw’s Monochrome Project, the piece exists in two versions: the first, with a single climax, lasts 15 minutes; the second, with two climaxes (one muted,…