i headed up the M5 to Birmingham last Sunday for a concert given by the CBSO Youth Orchestra at Symphony Hall. For many people in the audience, i suppose the highlight would have been two works by Berlioz: the concert opened with the Roman Carnival Overture and closed with the…
Tag:
Poland
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Twentieth century music is at an interesting point in its history from the perspective of recordings. Contemporary music, for obvious reasons, is always the most under-represented, whereas works from the last hundred years are beginning to reach the stage where’s there’s a more meaningful range of recordings available. In the…
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One of my unexpected highlights of 2017 was the album Contemporary Jewish Music by Polish composer Stefan Węgłowski, a mesmerising sequence of electroacoustic responses to a variety of Jewish sources, utterly transforming them while retaining tangible links to their origins. His latest release, PHASE_1_4, makes that album sound like an…
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The smallest-scale events at this year’s Estonian Music Days were a pair of chamber concerts at each end of the festival. Irina Zahharenkova’s keyboard recital at the Arvo Pärt Centre encompassed extremes of musical invention. The most egregious were two works dating from the early 1990s by a Russian guitarist…
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How have i never heard the music of Aleksandra Gryka before? That’s the question i’ve kept wondering while exploring Interialcell, a new CD featuring five works of hers performed by Klangforum Wien. It’s left me disappointed at making what is, for me, such a very late discovery (her worklist goes…
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Some composers you encounter all the time; others not so much. i’ve only come into contact with Marcin Stańczyk‘s music on one occasion: back in 2017, at the UK première of some drops… for double-bell trumpet and ensemble. Until, that is, just recently, when i began immersing myself in a…
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It must have been a strange experience for anyone smitten by the music of Krzysztof Penderecki during the 1960s and early 1970s, falling in love with the bold, abrasive, raw abstract shapes and sound forms unleashed in works such as Emanations (1959), Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), St…
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i feel terribly sad to have just read the news on the Schott website that Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki has died today. Composers impact on our lives in unique and unpredictable ways, and for me, Penderecki’s music has been an omnipresence. When i was still at school, just at the…
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In recent years, one of the most vividly memorable Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festivals was 2017, when the work of Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski was prominently featured. Huddersfield is in fact the only place in the UK that i’ve ever had the opportunity to experience Karkowski’s music performed live, which suggests…
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One of my absolute favourites at the most extreme end of pretty much all musical continua is Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski. Karkowski died just over five years ago, and digesting his legacy is something i’ve been attempting to do since his passing. While there are plenty of available recordings of his…
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2018: Philip Venables – Venables Plays Bartók; Laura Mvula – Love Like A Lion (World Premières); Agata Zubel – Fireworks (UK Première)
by 5:4The last few Proms premières have been, to put it mildly, an extremely mixed bag. By far the most excruciating of them was Venables Plays Bartók, a violin concerto of sorts by Philip Venables, given its first performance last Friday by Pekka Kuusisto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo. As its title…
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Tomorrow morning’s Prom concert, given by the European Union Youth Orchestra, includes the first UK performance of Fireworks, a recent work by Polish composer Agata Zubel. In anticipation of that, here are her answers to some of my pre-première questions (i’ve provided some information in lieu of answers for the final three…
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Some make their journeys alone. Others get together, as couples or in small gatherings. They connect and they divide. This may seem unpredictable. But you can guess which paths they will take. In the end, most of them follow their forebears. It’s gravity, apparently. While some composers persist in providing…
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At the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the world première of Body-Opera by Polish composer Wojtek Blecharz didn’t exactly go to plan. Located at The Hepworth Wakefield – and set up somewhat hurriedly in the aftermath of the awarding of The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture that had recently taken place – an ensuing…
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CD/Digital releases
New releases: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Markus Reuter, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Arditti Quartet, Eric Craven, Audiobulb, Zbigniew Karkowski, Nordvargr, Stockhausen
by 5:4It’s a while since i’ve had a chance to survey new releases, so there’s quite a few that are overdue being highlighted. Some of them appeared on my recent Best Albums of the Year list, such as Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s Aerial, out on Deutsche Grammophon. As i’ve mentioned in my previous articles…