Two weeks have passed since this year’s Proms season came to an end, so it’s time to take a look at how you responded to each of the new works in the annual 5:4 Proms première polls. i want to thank all of you who voted; there was a healthy-sized …
George Lewis
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A word that rarely comes to mind when listening to Proms premières is “brave”. Bravery in music, to me, involves a demonstration of the composer’s singular vision to the extent that many, even all, of the expectations that i may bring to the piece as a listener are ignored, overturned, …
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Tomorrow night’s Prom concert brings together music by Beethoven and the première of Minds in Flux, a 30-minute electroacoustic work by US composer George Lewis. As an upbeat to that, here are his answers to my pre-première questions, together with his programme for the piece. Many thanks to George for …
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There’s something absolutely right about the bringing together of Norway’s Only Connect – a festival that, as its name implies, encourages one to question (inter)connections between ostensibly disparate musics – with Tectonics, Ilan Volkov’s peripatetic festival the name of which evokes fundamental, underlying bedrocks that continually meet, connect and rupture. …
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ConcertsFestivalsPremières
HCMF 2016: Seth Parker Woods, Ensemble Resonanz + Elliott Sharp + Gareth Davis
by 5:4Friday at HCMF began with a recital by rising star cellist Seth Parker Woods. I’ve had the opportunity to see Woods play once before (at HCMF 2014) and the experience was a highly impressive one, so I was very much looking forward to seeing him in action again. He did not …
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ConcertsFestivalsPremières
HCMF 2016: Arditti Quartet + Jennifer Walshe, Ensemble Musikfabrik + Peter Brötzmann
by 5:4Music festivals understandably like to start with a bang; the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival began with a WTF. And not just one but two of them, courtesy of Jennifer Walshe with the Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Musikfabrik with Peter Brötzmann. Their respective ‘WTF-ness’ was partly superficial, partly the stark …