This time last year I was deeply immersed in the music of Gloria Coates. preparing for the Dialogue we were planning to record in July. It still fills me with deep sadness that Gloria’s cancer got to her before we could get together, but it’s been nice to see a …
orchestra
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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 …
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Symphony No. 16 (1979) Allan Pettersson’s final completed work shares some similarities to Violin Concerto No. 2, inasmuch as it blurs the distinction between symphony and concerto. Pettersson went as far as to describe the concerto as “a symphony for violin and orchestra”, and it’s tempting to regard Symphony No. …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphonies Nos. 14-15, 1978
by 5:4Somewhat incredibly, for a man crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and essentially confined to his apartment (four floors above ground level without an elevator), Allan Pettersson managed to begin and complete his next two symphonies within a single year.
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphony No. 13, Violin Concerto No. 2, 1976-77
by 5:4Symphony No. 13 (1976) In the first part of this Lent Series, i remarked on the sorry fact that most of the admittedly sparse commentary on Pettersson’s music has invariably adopted the stance that it is all bleak, tragic and full of despair. Several of the preceding works i’ve explored …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphony No. 12, Vox Humana, 1973-74
by 5:4Symphony No. 12 “De döda på torget” (1973-1974) When Allan Pettersson began work on his Twelfth Symphony, it had been nearly 30 years since he had set text to music (in the 24 Barfotasånger, completed in 1945). He turned to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, selecting nine poems that would …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphonies Nos. 10-11, Symfonisk sats, 1971-73
by 5:4Symphony No. 10 (1971-1972) Not since Harrison Birtwistle’s Exody have i had so much trepidation writing about an orchestral piece. Pettersson’s Symphony No. 10 picks up the baton from No. 9 and doesn’t just run with it, but positively sprints for a full 25 minutes. That in itself makes the …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphonies Nos. 8-9, 1968-70
by 5:4Symphony No. 8 (1968-1969) Allan Pettersson’s previous two symphonies, though structured as single movements, both featured what amounts to two distinct sections. Symphony No. 8 is the same, though here Pettersson explicitly divides the work into two movements. This is an interesting decision, as it can easily be argued that, …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphonies Nos. 6-7, 1963-67
by 5:4Symphony No. 6 (1963-1966) i said previously that Symphony No. 5 upped the ante, so perhaps it seems like hyperbole to say that in Symphony No. 6 Pettersson does it again, but there really is no other way of perceiving this vast 60-minute, single span behemoth. By this point in …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphonies Nos. 4-5, 1958-62
by 5:4Symphony No. 4 (1958-1959) By now, the paradigm is well-established: Pettersson’s music is one of disruptive struggle, where contrasting, sometimes contradictory, musical ideas jostle and collide in a cycle of seemingly unstoppable volatility. In his previous work, the Concerto No. 3 for String Orchestra, Pettersson had allowed himself a greater …
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: Symphonies Nos. 1-3, 1951-55
by 5:4Having spent a little over a decade exploring chamber and vocal music, from 1951 onward the trajectory of Allan Pettersson’s compositional journey changed, and changed permanently. In a similar way to Mahler, as soon as Pettersson began work on his first symphony, in 1951, it evidently became clear to him …
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Like many institutions, the Berlin Philharmonic set up their own record label some years ago, and for much of the last decade has been putting out lavish box sets, featuring not only audio recordings but also blu-rays drawn from their enormous video archive (accessible via the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall). …
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Perhaps there’s never been a more appropriate time for a music festival to take as its theme, “Border State”. Borders seem more prominent in world events than ever: we’ve seen them being viciously violated, vigorously reinforced, valiantly defended. Conflicts continue to rage, and the resultant feeling is one of separation …
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The other conductor filling in the blanks in a symphony cycle is John Storgårds. With the Oslo Philharmonic, Storgårds has previously recorded four of Per Nørgård‘s eight symphonies (numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6) on a couple of discs released by DaCapo in 2016, which i explored at the time. …
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There have been a couple of interesting examples recently of conductors filling in the blanks of their respective symphony cycles. Antoni Wit recorded all but one of Krzysztof Penderecki‘s eight symphonies with the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, issued on a series of five discs by Naxos in the noughties. …
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It’s a while since there’s been an album devoted to Tōru Takemitsu‘s orchestral music, so it’s been good to spend time with a new release from the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Christian Karlsen, that explores four of the composer’s works from the ’80s and ’90s. One of them is purely …
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i wish i could remember who once said to me that composing was like a form of time travel. The finished composition has a certain duration, but while working on the piece, the composer can move freely, forwards and backwards through what we might call the “compositional spacetime”, in the …
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Some years ago I was at the Royal Opera House, watching and listening with a growing sense of disbelief and horror as a contemporary opera entirely failed to understand or meaningfully capture the source material upon which it was based. That was Thomas Adès’ wretched The Exterminating Angel, an embarrassingly …
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Two years have passed since the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s previous series of albums, Recurrence, Concurrence, Occurrence, and their latest release, Atmospheriques Vol. I, is the start of a new series. As before, the orchestra is conducted by Daníel Bjarnasson, and the emphasis is again on Icelandic composers, though here they’re …
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Staunch conservatives don’t merely hold sway over our current government but also, it seems, our concert halls, judging by the latest desolation of premières at this year’s Proms. In the case of the Prelude and Fugue in G major by Rachel Laurin, posthumously premièred in Isabelle Demers’ organ recital, i …