The smallest-scale events at this year’s Estonian Music Days were a pair of chamber concerts at each end of the festival. Irina Zahharenkova’s keyboard recital at the Arvo Pärt Centre encompassed extremes of musical invention. The most egregious were two works dating from the early 1990s by a Russian guitarist …

This year’s Proms season has been announced in the last few days, and alongside all the standard fare, there’s the usual small smattering of contemporary music to get mildly excited about. Scanning through the programme, the most immediate thing that leapt out was familiarity, even predictability, the festival in general …

Even before my plane touched down at Tallinn airport, i knew that this year’s Estonian Music Days was going to feel a bit different. Last year marked the 20th anniversary of Estonia’s independence from Soviet occupation, and one of the effects of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is that Tallinn …

This morning i’m setting off for Tallinn, to explore the eclectic shenanigans at this year’s Estonian Music Days. Words to follow once i’m back later next week.

Curating this year’s Lent Series, focusing on death, grief and loss, has been something of a difficult experience. As i mentioned at the start of the series, this theme has felt unavoidable and inevitable at the moment, but at the same time works such as the ones i’ve featured, that …

The penultimate work in this year’s Lent Series is one that ended up having to wait over a quarter of a century from the date of composition to receive its first performance. James MacMillan completed his orchestral piece The Keening in 1987, while studying for his PhD at Durham University. …

The Arabic word ‘nakba’ (النكبة), which translates as “disaster” or “cataclysm”, is used to refer to the suffering, displacement and destruction wrought on the Palestinians from 1948 (with the wartime exodus) to the present day. It’s a term that has been in use right from the outset of the Israeli-Palestinian …

i’m turning to music that’s more abstract, though no less powerfully evocative, for the next work in this year’s Lent Series. The title of Chaya Czernowin‘s short 2018 guitar piece Black Flowers comes from a text by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: In the depths of matter there grows an obscure …

i wrote in Part 1 about the warm, inviting and relaxing atmosphere that pervaded each of the concerts at Borealis 2022. Establishing this kind of environment for audiences is vital, for two important reasons. First, because any festival that claims itself to be, as Borealis explicitly does, “for experimental music” …

For the spring 5:4 mixtape the theme has felt tragically unavoidable. i’ve opted to approach the subject of war partly in a generalised way, but it would have been disingenuous not to reflect the specifics of what Ukraine is currently being subjected to by Russia. The mix therefore opens with …

Even at the first concert of the first day of Borealis 2022, i was realising how much the festival felt different from the norm. i go to a lot of festivals (notwithstanding the upheavals of the last two years), and for the most part, aside from cultural distinctions, they’re all …

The word ‘solastalgia’ was invented in 2003 by philosopher Glenn Albrecht as a concept to describe the lived experience of negative environmental change. This indicates a variety of contexts – both actual and potential – in which one directly experiences grief and pain from the perception that one’s sense of …

The next work i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series is one that, in the six years since i first heard it, has completely changed my opinion about it. At the world première of John Woolrich’s Swan Song, i felt that “the fragmented delivery of transient moments of something cantabile …

The next piece i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series, focusing on grief and loss, is probably the shortest i’ve ever explored on 5:4. Naomi Pinnock’s We are consists of a mere 12 bars of music, lasting around 60 seconds. The piece was part of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Postcards from …

The next piece in my Lent Series is concerned with not just the possibility but the occasional necessity of having to progress through darkness. Some Paths Will Always Lead Through the Shadows was composed by Elis Hallik in 2021, and takes as inspiration words by poet Doris Kareva: Bitter and …

i’m setting off this morning for Bergen, to attend Norway’s most discombobulating new music festival Borealis. Words to follow once i get back next week – and once i’ve begun to figure out what on earth i experienced.

As i mentioned previously, the majority of the music i heard at this year’s Dark Music Days fell somewhere between emotional allusion and full-on abstraction. In many ways it was the most abstract music that made some of the strongest and most long-lasting impressions, primarily because of the composers’ focus …

The Lent Series continues today with a short, darkly ruminative work for baritone and ensemble by British composer Colin Matthews. It’s a setting of the poem ‘It rains’ by war poet Edward Thomas, one of two poems that Thomas composed in 1917 concerned with rain. ‘It rains’ is a wistful …

Postponed from its usual position in late January to early March due to last-minute Covid restriction shenanigans, Iceland’s Dark Music Days festival was therefore not quite so dark as usual. All the same, it was hardly the Light Music Days, and in any case Mother Nature was seemingly more determined …

For the next work in this year’s 5:4 Lent Series, i’m turning to a work for oboe and three organs by Estonian composer Lauri Jõeleht. A Prayer in Darkness dates from 2017, and its title is drawn from an eponymous poem by G. K. Chesterton, the final verse of which …