Over the last 10 years, as i’ve been immersing myself ever more deeply into Estonian contemporary music, i’ve tentatively reached a point where i feel i can be more or less confident of what certain composers will or won’t do. Yet i mentioned in Part 1 of the lingering sense …
Tag:
piano concerto
-
-
This year’s World New Music Days was, not surprisingly, an excellent opportunity to experience that most rare and unknown quantity: Faroese contemporary music. i’ve already mentioned how a significant proportion of composers from the Faroe Islands based their work on extant musical ideas and materials, usually folk-related. However, this wasn’t …
-
As an accompaniment to my Dialogue with composer Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes, the following is an essay written for the Estonian journal Sirp, originally published in Estonian translation last year. When I first heard the music of Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes, its effect was almost too much to take. It was in 2017, during …
-
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). …
-
As well as the intimacy demonstrated in several concerts at this year’s Sacrum Profanum festival in Kraków, many of the other performances provided opportunities for immersive listening, often within the context of large-scale durations. Two of these, both examples of primary colour, bargain basement minimalism, may well have been striving …
-
A composer i’ve been trying to get the measure of lately is Grażyna Bacewicz. Bacewicz died in 1969, but her output seems to be going through something of a rediscovery of late, with concert performances and new recordings now emerging with increasing regularity. It’s a generalisation, i know, but over …
-
In an artistic context, there’s an obvious world of difference between observation, taking inspiration from and / or seeking to emulate or analogise aspects of the natural world and human culture, and critique, taking issue with and / or seeking to highlight problems arising from or endemic within those same …
-
FestivalsPremières
Proms 2019: Jocelyn Pook – You Need to Listen to Us; Alissa Firsova – Red Fox; Ryan Wigglesworth – Piano Concerto (World Premières)
by 5:4A few weeks back, when critiquing Hans Zimmer’s short work Earth, i almost held back from writing about the piece as it was taking place in a concert for children. i couldn’t help wondering to what extent it was fair to hold up something so intentionally superficial to critical scrutiny. …
-
FestivalsPremières
Proms 2019: Dieter Ammann – Piano Concerto (“Gran Toccata”) (World Première)
by 5:4None of the premières so far at this year’s Proms has left me with a more conflicted first impression than Dieter Ammann‘s new Piano Concerto, given its first performance on Monday by Andreas Haefliger with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. The basis for that reaction is wrapped …
-
Scottish composer James Dillon is a regular fixture at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the last few years have included several of his larger-scale works. Of these, the performance of his Piano Concerto ‘Andromeda’ at HCMF 2014 was one of the most striking, and has remained vividly in mind …