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cello

  • Advent CalendarPremières

    György Kurtág – Circumdederunt… in memoriam Rita Wagner (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 15, 2024 • 06:00
    December 15, 2024 • 06:00

    Today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the shortest works i’ve ever written about. Circumdederunt… in memoriam Rita Wagner by György Kurtág commemorates the Hungarian pianist who died in 2021. Back in 2019, my esteemed blogospherical colleague David Nice mentioned that, after attending a masterclass with Wagner, he had “probably …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2024: the premières (Part 1)

    by 5:4 September 17, 2024 • 11:44
    September 17, 2024 • 11:44

    Wow, what a shitshow. Something occurred to me, while spending time with the first cluster of noxious specimens being given world, European or UK premières at this year’s Proms. In contrast to the notion of lying by omission, conveying a falsehood via things we don’t say, i realised that to …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Baltic & Estonian Music Days 2024 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 May 26, 2024 • 09:10
    May 26, 2024 • 09:10

    The opening weekend of this year’s Baltic & Estonian Music Days featured the final concert of their annual Young Composer competition, now in its tenth year. It was encouraging to witness that most rare of phenomena: the genuinely best works being the ones receiving the awards. All of the music …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Berlin Philharmonic – The Unsuk Chin Edition

    by 5:4 December 20, 2023 • 14:40
    December 20, 2023 • 14:40

    Like many institutions, the Berlin Philharmonic set up their own record label some years ago, and for much of the last decade has been putting out lavish box sets, featuring not only audio recordings but also blu-rays drawn from their enormous video archive (accessible via the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall). …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Sacrum Profanum 2023 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 November 22, 2023 • 12:23
    November 22, 2023 • 12:23

    As well as the intimacy demonstrated in several concerts at this year’s Sacrum Profanum festival in Kraków, many of the other performances provided opportunities for immersive listening, often within the context of large-scale durations. Two of these, both examples of primary colour, bargain basement minimalism, may well have been striving …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Per Nørgård – Symphony No. 8

    by 5:4 October 23, 2023 • 14:06
    October 23, 2023 • 14:06

    The other conductor filling in the blanks in a symphony cycle is John Storgårds. With the Oslo Philharmonic, Storgårds has previously recorded four of Per Nørgård‘s eight symphonies (numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6) on a couple of discs released by DaCapo in 2016, which i explored at the time. …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 December 1, 2022 • 15:24
    December 1, 2022 • 15:24

    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 …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Deborah Walker – Starflux

    by 5:4 December 5, 2020 • 10:16
    December 5, 2020 • 10:16

    It was earlier this year that i first encountered the label Elli Records, self-described as “an independent label focused on music made by humans, for humans, with computers”. Nothing particularly unusual about that, but while i’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of their five years’ worth of releases, …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Various – Epicycle II

    by 5:4 August 27, 2020 • 14:08
    August 27, 2020 • 14:08

    Released tomorrow is a new album of eight works by Icelandic composers, all of which have been curated by – and in some cases created in collaboration with – cellist and vocalist Gyða Valtýsdóttir. The general tone of these works, all of which are quite brief, is meditative in nature, …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir – Vernacular; Siggi String Quartet – South of the Circle; Iceland Symphony Orchestra – Concurrence

    by 5:4 January 17, 2020 • 11:17
    January 17, 2020 • 11:17

    In just over a week’s time Iceland’s premier new music festival, the Dark Music Days, will be up and running again, and once again i’ll be heading off to Reykjavík to immerse myself in some of the goings-on. Details about the festival can be found here, and for any UK …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Esa-Pekka Salonen – Cello Concerto

    by 5:4 July 15, 2019 • 16:27
    July 15, 2019 • 16:27

    One of my highlights from last year came at the end of the summer, during the final concert at the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm. An occasion given over to celebrating composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (which i reviewed elsewhere), the concert included a performance of Salonen’s Cello Concerto given …

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2019: Zoë Martlew

    by 5:4 February 6, 2019 • 14:00
    February 6, 2019 • 14:00

    One of the plagues that continues to afflict most contemporary music festivals is ‘première-itis’, an acute obsession with presenting loudly-trumpeted world premières at the expense of providing opportunities for second, third or indeed nth performances. It was a relief, therefore, that this year’s Dark Music Days (which was otherwise similarly …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2017: Brian Elias – Cello Concerto (World Première)

    by 5:4 August 11, 2017 • 21:14
    August 11, 2017 • 21:14

    Around a month ago, i bumped into Brian Elias at the Cheltenham Music Festival, and we had a brief chat about his forthcoming Cello Concerto, premièred a couple of nights ago at the Proms. As i mentioned in my article with his pre-première questions, he expressed some reservations about including …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2017: Pascal Dusapin – Outscape (UK Première)

    by 5:4 July 22, 2017 • 11:08
    July 22, 2017 • 11:08

    Concertos are a regular occurrence among Proms premières. Usually – too often – they’re for violin, but last year bucked this trend by featuring a pair of cello concertos (by Huw Watkins and Charlotte Bray). The 2017 season is bucking it some more, again featuring two of them, the first …

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  • 20th CenturyAnniversariesBlasts from the Past

    Blasts from the Past: Dmitri Shostakovich – Cello Concerto No. 2

    by 5:4 September 25, 2016 • 11:12
    September 25, 2016 • 11:12

    On 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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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2016: Malcolm Hayes – Violin Concerto; Huw Watkins – Cello Concerto; Charlotte Bray – Falling in the Fire (World Premières)

    by 5:4 August 16, 2016 • 10:25
    August 16, 2016 • 10:25

    Three Proms, three world premières, three concertos, one for violin, two for cello, all lasting around 25 minutes. The similarities between them go little deeper than these most basic facts, though, each occupied with a very particular soundworld, aesthetic, and relationship between soloist and orchestra. The results were similarly mixed.

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  • Premières

    Per Nørgård – Three Nocturnal Movements (World Première)

    by 5:4 June 5, 2016 • 16:04
    June 5, 2016 • 16:04

    It’s Constitution Day (Grundlovsdag) in Denmark today, the closest the country gets to a national day, so i thought i’d mark the occasion with a piece by one of the country’s best-known composers that i’ve been spending time with lately. It’s a re-thinking by Per Nørgård of one of his earlier works, Remembering Child, …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2015: Betsy Jolas – Wanderlied (UK Première), Shiori Usui – Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. & Joanna Lee – Hammer of Solitude (World Premières)

    by 5:4 July 31, 2015 • 13:59
    July 31, 2015 • 13:59

    Last Saturday’s Proms Matinee concert given by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Franck Ollu, featured several world and UK premières, which together gave one pause for thought with regard to the relationship between surface materials and their deeper impulsion. Their respective points of inspirational departure were extremely varied, encompassing …

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  • Lent Series

    Pierre Boulez – Messagesquisse

    by 5:4 March 24, 2015 • 21:17
    March 24, 2015 • 21:17

    The second concerto-esque work by Pierre Boulez that i want to explore this week is Messagesquisse for cello solo and six cellos. The gestation of this piece was very much more straightforward than that of Mémoriale, being composed in 1976 as a 70th birthday present for that great champion of …

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  • Lent SeriesPremières

    Davíð Brynjar Franzson – on Matter and Materiality (World Première)

    by 5:4 February 26, 2015 • 17:50
    February 26, 2015 • 17:50

    Without wishing to appear too biased towards the cello, the next concerto in my Lent series is another work that features that instrument at its epicentre. A few months back, i was enthusing about Davíð Brynjar Franzson‘s radical treatment of the piano; in his new work on Matter and Materiality, …

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5:4
  • About
    • Other writings
  • Patrons
  • The Lists
    • Listening History
    • Complete List of Ratings
    • Compositions explored on 5:4
    • Albums and EPs reviewed on 5:4
    • Festivals reviewed on 5:4
    • Best Albums of the Years
    • The Proms premières – Poll results
  • The Dialogues
  • Mixtapes
    • Mixtapes
    • The Isolation Mixtapes
    • Mystery Mixtapes
    • Podcasts
  • Contact
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