orchestra

Thomas Adès has always tended to be as qualitatively erratic as he is consistently overhyped, but his new orchestral piece Aquifer finds him back on the right side of accomplishment. The title refers to a subterranean stratum through which water can flow, and it’s a superb descriptor for both the …

Wow, what a shitshow. Something occurred to me, while spending time with the first cluster of noxious specimens being given world, European or UK premières at this year’s Proms. In contrast to the notion of lying by omission, conveying a falsehood via things we don’t say, i realised that to …

Portrait albums can be a double-edged sword. They’re obviously a great opportunity to present a showcase of someone’s work. Hardly surprising, then, that for many composers, securing that first album devoted to their music is regarded as an important, even vital step on the path toward something that might approximate …

It was a little under a year ago that the CPO label brought out the first volume in their new series exploring the Complete Symphonic Works of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz. As i pointed out in my review, they effectively jumped into her music halfway through, beginning in the early …

The opening weekend of this year’s Baltic & Estonian Music Days featured the final concert of their annual Young Composer competition, now in its tenth year. It was encouraging to witness that most rare of phenomena: the genuinely best works being the ones receiving the awards. All of the music …

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 …

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 …

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. …

Somewhat 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.

Symphony 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 …

Symphony 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 …

Symphony 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 …

Symphony 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, …

Symphony 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 …

Symphony 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 …

Having 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 …

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). …

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 …

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. …

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. …