Premières

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, …

In last year’s Advent Calendar i featured an arrangement of one of Ravel’s piano works by Boulez; this year i’m exploring one by UK composer Colin Matthews. Ravel completed his five-movement piano suite Miroirs in 1905. He subsequently orchestrated two of the movements himself, Une barque sur l’océan and Alborada …

For today’s Advent Calendar work i’m returning to one of the composers who stood out most prominently among the premières at last year’s Proms festival. Elizabeth Ogonek‘s Cloudline wasn’t just one of my own favourites, you evidently felt exactly the same way, as the work almost came top of the …

Michael Finnissy’s Polskie tańce ludowe (Polish folk dances) have had multiple lives. Their origins are in a volume of Polish folk music given to Finnissy as a child by his godfather, Peter Klos. Finnissy recently recalled to me that … he served with the Polish Airforce, he was not a …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a beautiful, contemplative orchestral work by Canada-based composer Linda Catlin Smith. Wilderness was composed in 2005, and while it would be inaccurate to call it a work for violin and orchestra (still less a concerto), a solo violin has a role distinct from the …

Francisco López‘s second live performance at Cafe Oto, in March 2015, makes a strong contrast to the first (featured earlier this month); where that had harnessed electronic elements largely devoid of referential qualities, this piece focuses on a juxtaposition of sounds that are clearly derived from (or intended to imitate) …

Today’s work in the 5:4 Advent Calendar is a typically leftfield piece by British musician Mica Levi. Levi’s music encompasses the deep and the trivial, the profound and the nonsensical, sometimes simultaneously. Their work BOUND. 9 Minuets, for two small snare drums & ensemble, tends more towards the latter than …

One of the more memorable works performed at the inaugural Baltic Music Days in 2020 was Mundus Invisibilis by Latvian composer Anna Fišere (formerly Ķirse). That piece was concerned with fungal mycelium, and her earlier work Radices for 8 singers and electronics, composed in 2018, is similarly rooted in the …

Particles by Japanese composer Shiori Usui consists of four minutes of wild textural mayhem. The title suggests it’s all going to be about light, tiny impacts, and that is how the work begins. However, this opening chorus of skitterings is soon supplanted by the significant heft of what sound like …