Premières

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…

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.…

Concerts of contemporary music have a tendency to be obsessed with presenting premières, yet it’s all too common for those performances to be dazzling one-offs that are all too soon lost to oblivion. So there’s some serious kudos due to NMC for saving two such performances, both electroacoustic, both showcasing…

This text is an expanded version of the article originally published (in Estonian translation) by Sirp, 16 September 2022. Looking back through Erkki-Sven Tüür’s first nine symphonies, they exhibit a great deal of consistency, primarily with regard to the use of contrasting musical ideas, often presented as bold juxtapositions, sometimes…

This text is an expanded version of the article originally published (in Estonian translation) by Sirp, 16 September 2022. It’s surely true that no composers today – and very few composers historically – would give any credence whatever to the so-called “curse of the ninth”, the absurd superstition that, having…

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…

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…

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.…

In an artistic context, there’s an obvious world of difference between observation, taking inspiration from and / or seeking to emulate or analogise aspects of the natural world and human culture, and critique, taking issue with and / or seeking to highlight problems arising from or endemic within those same…

A few weeks back in this year’s Proms season, Sally Beamish’s Hive gave the impression that the occasion was aimed at children, and it was much the same listening to Thomas Adès‘ Märchentänze, given its UK première last Friday. Adès is such a strangely unpredictable composer, capable of extremes of…

i’m not sure whether to interpret the Proms’ decision to place Mark-Anthony Turnage‘s new orchestral piece in a concert alongside Vaughan Williams and Elgar as an attempt to imply some kind of genteel, ‘establishment figure’ status. Yet – would that be wrong? Now in his early 60s, Turnage’s music has…

Sunday evening’s Prom included the European première (so nice to see Britain still regarded as being in Europe) of Missy Mazzoli‘s new Violin Concerto. Parenthetically subtitled ‘Procession’, the work is something of a response to the time of lockdown, examining, in Mazzoli’s words “how we use music and ritual to…

Does it matter if the way a composition sounds doesn’t bear any meaningful resemblance to the composer’s stated inspiration? That’s a question that often suggests itself when listening to contemporary music, and it has completely dominated my listening to Austrian composer Hannah Eisendle‘s new work Heliosis, which received its first…

The relationship between Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s music and nature has always been, to put it mildly, complicated. Far from being a composer merely setting out (as far too many have claimed far too often) to evoke the wildness of her native Iceland, Thorvaldsdottir has tended to be much more concerned with…

Voices returned to contemporary music at the Proms on Wednesday evening, with the first performance of Matthew Kaner‘s new vocal work Pearl. The piece, for baritone and orchestra, takes its title from the Middle English poem Pearl, written by the anonymous Gawain Poet, setting portions of the text from Simon…

Finally. Following six premières of, to say the least, wildly varying quality, this year’s Proms season finally struck gold on Monday evening in the form of Gavin Higgins‘ new large-scale work for brass band and orchestra, Concerto Grosso. First things first: it’s a bit of an odd title, as the…

Almost exactly 10 years ago, i coined a new adjective, ‘Faberian’, in reference to Faber Music, to summarise what i later described as “the kind of thing one hears all too often in works from the more mainstream protagonists of that particular publishing house”. On that first occasion i elaborated…

As part of the Proms’ inexorable slide away from concert works in an attempt to remain relevant, yesterday evening’s event was given over to orchestral arrangements and reworkings of music from videogames. They included the European première (following a performance by the LA Philharmonic late last year) of Robert Ames‘…

Canadian composer Nicole Lizée‘s new percussion concerto, premièred last month in Ottowa, received its first European performance at the Proms last Friday evening. Its title, Blurr is the Colour of My True Love’s Eyes, though somewhat strange at first, perhaps suggests the two main aspects of the work. The first…

Last night’s Prom was a monarchist’s paradise, waxing lyrical in the Queen’s platinum jubilee year with an evening of music composed for royal occasions. Nestling among all the sonic bowing and scraping and forelock-tugging from the usual early 20th century shower was a short new choral work from Cheryl Frances-Hoad,…