Lithuania

i’m bringing my annual January exploration of free music to a close with an album that, as happens every year, should have appeared in my Best Albums of 2022 but i ended up listening to it just too late. That being said, when i first spent time with Encircle, by…

One of my personal highlights of this year’s Huddersfield Festival was the performance of Justė Janulytė‘s 2020 work for 8 trumpets, Unanime. Composed for Marco Blaauw’s Monochrome Project, the piece exists in two versions: the first, with a single climax, lasts 15 minutes; the second, with two climaxes (one muted,…

Today’s featured work is one for the southern hemisphere, now entering its warmest months of the year. Composed in 1991, Lithuanian composer Onutė Narbutaitė‘s Vasara is a miniature choral homage to the season of summer. The words, written by the composer, have a nostalgic flavour, looking back at the experiences…

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…

People doing interesting things to objects doesn’t necessarily create interesting music. Can we agree on that? i don’t think that’s a particularly outrageous thing to say, though there were a number of times during my six days at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival when i found myself wondering otherwise.…

The word ‘solastalgia’ was invented in 2003 by philosopher Glenn Albrecht as a concept to describe the lived experience of negative environmental change. This indicates a variety of contexts – both actual and potential – in which one directly experiences grief and pain from the perception that one’s sense of…

A couple of days ago we crossed the threshold into winter, so for both today’s and tomorrow’s Advent Calendar pieces i’m exploring music that either invokes or evokes the cold. Invocation first, in the form of Now I’m Nowhere, a work for male voices by Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė. Janulytė…

Does the phrase “Baltic music” mean anything? Is it something that has a discrete, tangible identity? i found myself considering this question during pretty much every concert of this year’s first ever Baltic Music Days. A festival that’s been in the offing for a number of years, bringing together composers…

For the last six years, the SWR Vokalensemble and conductor Marcus Creed have been on a systematic journey through choral music from all points of the globe. It’s a journey i wasn’t aware of until earlier this year, when a large box set unexpectedly arrived at my door, ambitiously titled…