The good people at Seismograf – one of the few really interesting sources discussing new music these days, and pretty much the only one i read – asked me recently to contribute to their “Would you like to see my playlist?” series. It’s recently been published, and i thought i’d …
Tag:
orchestra
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Another year, another Grażyna Bacewicz portrait CD. CPO’s series Complete Symphonic Works, begun in 2023 and featuring the WDR Symphony Orchestra, concluded after three volumes with the wildly inaccurate claim that they’d released the lot. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Orchestral Works series on Chandos, also begun in 2023, has only …
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Self-knowledge is an ongoing, never-ending thing, isn’t it? The other evening i was streaming a performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie on the Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall, and became increasingly aware of the extent to which this particular piece not only shaped me as a musician, but also revealed aspects of …
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My first impression of Toivo Tulev, established nearly a decade ago during my first few sojourns to Estonia, was of a composer whose language was one of polarised extremes. The more i’ve got to know his music over the years, the more that first impression has been confirmed: Tulev’s is …
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Anniversaries were the focus at this year’s Estonian Music Days festival. The festival’s theme, ‘Sada’ (100), celebrated the centenary of the country’s Composers’ Union. There was therefore something of a retrospective flavour to certain aspects of the festival, revisiting significant works in addition to paying tribute to various notable figures …
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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 …
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Especially prominent at this year’s Musica Nova festival was the lavish organ in Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo concert hall, unveiled at the start of 2024. The largest modern concert hall organ in the world, its construction was partly made possible by one of Finland’s greatest composers, the late Kaija Saariaho, who in …
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Two years ago i wrote that a composer i’d been “trying to get the measure of” was Grażyna Bacewicz. Since then, CPO have helped that process with a series of albums exploring her orchestral music, the latest of which, Complete Orchestral Works Vol. 3, has recently been released. It’s clear …
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Continuing my short survey of recent portrait discs, a different kind of surprise came from Midnight Sun Variations, a collection of orchestral works by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. The world première of Midnight Sun Variations, performed at the 2019 Proms by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgårds, left me …
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It was 16 years ago that my first Best Albums of the Year list was published, and for most of the years since there have been 40 entries on the list. However, there were many times when recommending 40 as genuinely ‘best’ felt like a struggle, and a few years …
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HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Behind the final door on this year’s Advent Calendar is a short but exciting work by one of England’s more curiously neglected composers, Hugh Wood. The Variations for Orchestra began life 30 years ago, apparently composed over a three-year period from 1994 to 1997. That seems a surprisingly …
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As i’ve often remarked here (usually in connection with yet another Proms commission) i’m not a fan of contemporary works that seek to ‘respond’ to earlier music. It’s a lazy commissioning approach, usually producing dismal musical results, with the only successes emanating from composers who aren’t particularly fussed about how …
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There are times when it can feel like all contemporary music is split down the middle, with half the composers concerned with frantic activity and movement, and the other half obsessed with the opposite, stillness and immobility. That’s an exaggeration, but there’s more than a little truth to it, and …
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Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a quick bit of fun from British composer Sasha Scott. In 2019, Scott won the Senior category in the BBC Young Composer of the Year Competition with a four-minute orchestral-electronic hybrid titled Humans May Not Apply. It’s a work that both pits the acoustic …
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The piece lurking behind today’s Advent Calendar door is something of an amuse-bouche by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, titled ein kleines symphonisches Gedicht [a little symphonic poem]. Composed in 2017, its 7-minute duration is occupied with one of Haas’ typically focused behavioural-timbral explorations, looking at the way both transformation …
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i’ve heard many wonderful things during my numerous trips to Estonia during the last decade, but today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the most memorable of them all. That may seem strange considering it’s done and dusted in under four minutes, but its brevity is one of the prime …
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It might seem a bit seasonally early, but the title of today’s Advent Calendar piece is, i suspect, to be taken figuratively. A Forest Reawakens by Electra Perivolaris is a short but potent orchestral work that articulates what one could read as the beginnings of a process of rebirth or …
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It’s 1 December, and the festive season is distantly hoving into view, the perfect time for another 5:4 Advent Calendar, featuring 25 days of sonic wonders, curiosities, trifles and delights. The first of these baubles is Dance from a Distance, a miniature orchestral bit of fun from one of my …
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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 …