Italy

One of the most fascinating events at this year’s Musica Nova festival was LOKS – four concerts at once. Not so much a performance as a film juxtaposing and compositing four separate performances, it featured music by four composers whose initials form the title: Lauri Supponen, Oene val Geel, Krists …

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.

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.

i’m turning today to an enigmatic piece by Giacinto Scelsi, one of the last he ever composed. Maknongan dates from 1976, just a year before Scelsi would cease composing altogether. At this time, his attention had become focused on low sounds. Dharana, composed the previous year, is for cello and …

While the theoretical theme of this year’s AFEKT festival was music theatre, in practice what was projected strongest was intimacy, in terms of one-to-one communication. This was due to the fact that the festival focused primarily on solo performances given by, among others, members of Ensemble Musikfabrik, and even in …

Back in April, when i summarised the new music featured at this year’s Proms, i mentioned that the time might have come for me to finally give up trying to find some enthusiasm for its safe, unimaginative offerings. The 2023 season has been up and running for a couple of …

Very few performances at Only Connect 2023 failed to impress. Among the exceptions was Caminante by Michael Pisaro, premièred on the opening night by Trondheim Sinfonietta with bassist Michael Francis Duch. Though the work began well, establishing a nicely darkened texture that became almost gritty and dirty, as soon as …

It’s reasonable to expect extreme variety and diversity at Ultima, though many of the more conventional concert events i experienced at this year’s festival were a surprisingly mixed bag, qualitatively speaking. The most taxing was unfortunately a concert celebrating the award of this year’s Arne Nordheim prize to Jan Martin …

In addition to conventional acoustic and electronic music, there was the opportunity to explore a variety of audiovisual work during my time in Tallinn. This was primarily due to COMMUTE, a fringe festival run by the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, with late evening concerts each day, after the …

i’m really not a conductor fanboy. Composers are always getting me excited; performers too, from time to time; but conductors, in general, not so much. There are some special cases: Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly have both stunned me on countless occasions; i’ve always had a lot of time for …

One of my recurring trains of thought during HCMF 2021 was concerned with the notion of continuity. This was, very simply, due to the fact that all of the best things i heard at the festival had an incredibly clear, logical sense running through them that, regardless of their inner …

HCMF always has its fair share of unconventional, genre-defying performances, and this year was no exception. Among the more unusual was Eupepsia/Dyspepsia devised by Austrian composer Eva Reiter. Taking the form of a concert-cum-lecture (or possibly lecture-cum-concert), the focus of the work was on the socio-cultural effects wrought on Bolivia …

Though this year it only lasted five days instead of ten, i came away from the 2021 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with the distinct impression that, somehow, the usual quantity of music had been compressed into a reduced time frame. That’s not, mercifully, because of any attempt to shoehorn many …

In addition to the soundwalks, installations, music theatre, performance art and electroacoustic shenanigans, Ultima 2021 also had its fair share of more conventional ensemble concerts, which took place in two Oslo churches. The beautiful Tøyen Kirke played host to two of Norway’s most prominent new music ensembles, asamisimasa and Cikada.

The saying goes that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, but in the case of the Ultima festival in Oslo, the latter half of which i experienced last week, i don’t think i truly realised how much i’d missed contemporary music festivals until i was back in …

What’s the difference between consistency and tautology? It’s a question i’ve returned to repeatedly over the last few years primarily in relation to the music of both Rebecca Saunders and Autechre, and it seems to be pertinent to Clara Iannotta as well. Last year, when exploring the previous album of …

Considering that most of us have been spending the last 12 months in varying forms of isolation, it seems a fitting time to focus on music for solo instruments. German label Kairos clearly feels the same way, as they’ve recently brought out a short series of five albums, each titled …

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, …

The other newly-released portrait album that’s got me thinking about polarities lately is Earthing, featuring four works for string quartet by Italian composer Clara Iannotta. The reason it provoked that particular train of thought (among many others) is due to the fact that, unlike most new music, it doesn’t so …

In addition to purely electronic music, this year’s Estonian Music Days once again featured many works melding instrumental and electronic elements. The most potent collision of old and new technology came at the Arvo Pärt Centre on Saturday afternoon, where Anna-Liisa Eller’s kannel (the traditional Estonian instrument, a form of …