chamber music

And finally we reach the zenith, the apex of this year’s best albums, each and every one of them a bewilderment of shock, awe and wonder.

Everybody needs more Galina Ustvolskaya in their life. Especially at this time of year, which so easily and so unthinkingly tends to the traditional, the saccharine and the stupid. i’ve explored Ustvolskaya’s bracingly refreshing, invariably mesmerising music on several occasions, including her first and third symphonies. i remarked before about …

On 3 December i explored a performance of Giacinto Scelsi‘s enigmatic late piece Maknongan on electronics. This second performance, which comes from the same concert, uses the kannel – the Estonian folk zither – performed by Anna-Liisa Eller with a mixture of fingers and ebow.

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 …

When words emerge in Naomi Pinnock‘s music, that’s precisely what they do: emerge. This is achieved partly by paring down the text to a bare essential minimum (The writings of Jakob Br. uses just two words, for example), but more due to the manner in which the words are articulated. …

British composer Michael Finnissy has so often turned to extant music in his own compositions that it’s practically one of the defining features of his work. Today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of his most blissful responses to earlier music, rethinking material by Byrd and Ockeghem as Two Motets for …

At the more serious end of the expressive spectrum, there was a lot to take in during my long weekend at this year’s HCMF. It was disappointing to witness, in Ann Cleare‘s TERRARIUM, yet another example of that which has become so prevalent at HCMF in recent years, a multimedia …

Despite the fact that in recent years my general feeling about the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is that it’s become over-familiar and rather predictable – perhaps in need of a fresh start / reboot – my experience during the opening weekend of this year’s HCMF was genuinely unexpected: music that …

Lysis is the name of Canadian composer Amy Brandon‘s latest album, featuring eight works for various chamber, ensemble and electroacoustic groupings. The word ‘lysis’ is a word with several meanings, mostly biological, primarily referring to the breakdown of cells. There’s something very apt in that choice of word for Brandon’s …

Waiting for me on my doormat when i returned from Vienna a few days ago was a new CD of music by the Estonian composer Age Veeroos. i’ve been doubly excited waiting for it to arrive, partly because i was honoured to be asked to write the liner notes for …

This year’s World New Music Days was, not surprisingly, an excellent opportunity to experience that most rare and unknown quantity: Faroese contemporary music. i’ve already mentioned how a significant proportion of composers from the Faroe Islands based their work on extant musical ideas and materials, usually folk-related. However, this wasn’t …

i wrote before about the way the World New Music Days acts like a hadron collider, smashing together diverse stylistic and aesthetic ideas from around the world. One of the startling truths to emerge from this violent eclecticism is that, what makes bad music bad, wherever it comes from in …

Two of the events at this year’s Baltic & Estonian Music Days were especially memorable. The first was given by one of the finest choirs in the world, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Conducted by Mai Simson in the somewhat simple, functional interior of Tartu’s otherwise imposing St Paul’s Church, …

As i mentioned previously, this year’s combined Baltic & Estonian Music Days took place in the southern city of Tartu, due to it being one of the three 2024 European Capitals of Culture. To mark the occasion, Märt-Matis Lill composed an elaborate fanfare to herald the start of the festival, …

i’m thrilled to be presenting the latest instalment in my occasional series The Dialogues. On this occasion, i’m sitting down with Estonian composer Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes, whose music i’ve been marvelling at ever since first contact at the 2017 Estonian Music Days. We got together at my rented apartment in Tallinn’s …

I want to flag up two recent albums for which i’ve contributed liner notes, both of which focus on music from Norway, and both of which have coincidentally been released around the same time.

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and String Quartet (1949) Arriving at Allan Pettersson’s first violin concerto comes as something of a shock. On the one hand, it continues the composer’s focus on chamber music that dates back to his earliest pieces, as well as his exploration of counterpoint, which was …

In the second part of this year’s Lent Series, focusing on the recently released BIS Complete Edition of Allan Petterson’s music, i’m continuing to explore the earliest compositions, which include his first large-scale work.

About a year-and-a-half ago, in the summer of 2022, i emailed the Swedish label BIS to ask whether they might at some point box up all of their individual releases of Allan Pettersson‘s symphonies. (At the time i was immersed in the box set released by CPO, featuring all of …

Sacrum Profanum is a festival that has taken place in Kraków, Poland, since 2003. As its name suggests, the original purpose of the festival was to juxtapose sacred and secular music, from the 18th and 19th centuries, but since 2008 it’s been focused on music from the 20th and 21st …