It’s often felt a bit strange for me that the composer about whose music i’m the most passionate, whose music occupies the largest percentage of my music collection, and whose music i’ve analysed and studied in more depth and therefore know more about than any other composer, is someone i …
Tag:
20th Century
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Lent SeriesPremières
Olivier Messiaen – Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (Oiseau tui) (World Première)
by 5:4For the next work in this year’s nature-themed Lent Series i’m turning to not so much a fully-fleshed, self-contained composition, but something of a miniature curiosity, an outtake saved from the cutting-room floor that’s subsequently been restored. Olivier Messiaen‘s final orchestral work, Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà…, completed in 1991, was a …
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It would be disingenuous to downplay just how laugh out loud funny is so much of John Oswald’s music. And this is surely one of the main reasons why he has fallen foul of the more simple-minded legal “brains” in the pop industry, since a casual encounter with his later …
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The most fascinating – and the most extensive – campaign of reissuing earlier work that i’ve ever encountered is by US artist Matt Waldron, better known as irr. app. (ext.). His earliest releases date from the late 1990s, a time when Waldron’s access to and capabilities with technology were apparently …
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Another composer who has been polishing off, smartening up and reissuing old works recently is Canadian Paul Dolden. It always surprises me how underappreciated and even unknown Dolden’s music continues to be, particularly as it’s among the most extreme stuff i’ve ever encountered (and, for good or ill, people love …
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A few months back i wrote about about the appearance of various releases by The Hafler Trio on Bandcamp, which quite apart from being highly unexpected (hitherto Andrew M. McKenzie had seemed opposed to his output being released in a digital format) is a very good thing indeed, since most …
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i’ve been waiting for this for three years. At the 2017 Estonian Music Days, i experienced a double onslaught to the head and heart courtesy of choir Vox Clamantis performing the music of Cyrillus Kreek. For this reason more than any other, i’ve clung to the memories of that first …
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CD/Digital releases
all that dust: music by Morton Feldman, Matthew Shlomowitz, Séverine Ballon, Milton Babbitt and Luigi Nono
by 5:4The launching of a new label devoted to contemporary music is something to celebrate, and the newest kid on the block is all that dust, the brainchild of composer Newton Armstrong, soprano Juliet Fraser and pianist Mark Knoop. The label’s first five releases have recently appeared, and there are a …
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AnniversariesBlasts from the Past
Blasts from the Past: Dmitri Shostakovich – Cello Concerto No. 2
by 5:4On this day, in 1966, Dmitri Shostakovich turned 60, and the evening brought a birthday concert including the world première of his Cello Concerto No. 2. The piece is well worth singling out for celebration, partly because to my mind it starts to resolve the very real difficulties that confront …
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i had many reasons for wanting to hear last night’s National Youth Orchestra concert at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, not least of which was simply to hear NYO in action again. They are an astonishing orchestra, not merely able but mature, sensitive and abounding in talent; their rendition of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie a few …
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World premières are understandably exciting occasions—but, equally, they can often be fraught with difficulty and no little controversy. The annals of music history contain many such examples, from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to Cage’s 4’33”, but today marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most legendary and poignant of …
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“Vous êtes de la merde!” i’m going to begin 2016 by looking back 70 years to the earliest acknowledged work by one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated composers, Pierre Boulez. For much of his life, but particularly as a young composer, Boulez’s perceived demeanour was, to put it mildly, …
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As it’s Hallowe’en, with All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days closely following (and Remembrance Day a little after that), i’m going to tap into the prevailing temporal undertone and explore a few pieces concerned one way or another with the subject of death. To begin, a piece that is wholeheartedly …
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For reasons as much to do with priorities as anything stylistic or aesthetic, pop music doesn’t get featured on 5:4 very often. But it would be remiss of me not to make some mention of today’s 30th anniversary of one of the most exhilarating debut albums ever made, Frankie Goes …
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My next blast from the past is a rather lovely work by the Italian composer Aldo Clementi, who died in 2011. Clementi’s interest in both bell-type sounds (music boxes, carillons, etc.) and the notion of self-generating music can be heard to good effect in Madrigale, composed 35 years ago, in …
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One of the most beguiling and enigmatic premières i’ve encountered in recent times took place at Birmingham’s Frontiers Festival in March, heard for the first time outside the USA no fewer than 54 years after its composition. There doesn’t seem to be any good reason for this considerable feat of …
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A couple of days ago marked the eighth anniversary of the death of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. To mark the event, and also begin a new occasional series on 5:4, i’d like to take a brief look back at one of the more enigmatic works of Ligeti’s career. Poème symphonique …
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From one of Brian Ferneyhough’s less familiar works i’m turning today to one of the best known, the Missa Brevis, composed in 1969. The very fact that Ferneyhough turned to a form and text so embedded in the development and consciousness of western music, so infused with associations, may seem …
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Today i’m going to focus on a relatively early work of Ferneyhough’s, Prometheus for wind sextet, composed in 1967. It’s not a piece that’s performed terribly often, nor is there much information about it, i suspect in part due to how early it was composed (when Ferneyhough was just 24 …
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This week sees the 70th birthday of one of the UK’s most significant composers, Brian Ferneyhough. For nearly fifty years, his music has been thrilling and discombobulating audiences in not entirely equal measure, pursuing his compositional goals with ruthless, painstaking rigour. As has long been the case with its most …