Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a short electroacoustic work by Bethan Morgan-Williams. The unusual word in the work’s title originates from one of my favourite linguistical sources, the wonderful Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where ‘kenopsia’ (presumably a blending of the Greek words ‘kenosis’, indicating an act of emptying or …
UK
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Today’s Advent Calendar piece is a beautiful curiosity from 2014 by British composer Max de Wardener. This particular piece, which is untitled, came as the last of three new works by de Wardener performed live at the Southbank Centre in 2014, the first of which was also untitled, while the …
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One of my recurring trains of thought during HCMF 2021 was concerned with the notion of continuity. This was, very simply, due to the fact that all of the best things i heard at the festival had an incredibly clear, logical sense running through them that, regardless of their inner …
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Though this year it only lasted five days instead of ten, i came away from the 2021 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with the distinct impression that, somehow, the usual quantity of music had been compressed into a reduced time frame. That’s not, mercifully, because of any attempt to shoehorn many …
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Not everything i heard at Ultima 2021 was bound up in convolutions of meaning. Ryoji Ikeda‘s forays into the world of percussion (which i previously explored in 2018) are a sidestep away from his more central work in multi-layered representations and interpretations of data, instead concerned much more directly with …
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What music “means” – to the composer, and to the listener – is always a fluid, unpredictable thing, and it’s debatable to what extent we have much control over it. For the last few years, as summer has drawn to a close i’ve found myself listening to a short work …
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The last time i wrote about a Birmingham Contemporary Music Group concert, i began the article with an observation, a complaint and a plea; this time, i’m starting with a shock and a nice surprise. The shock comes from the realisation that that previous concert took place no fewer than …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2021: Grace-Evangeline Mason – The Imagined Forest (World Première); Samy Moussa – A Globe Itself Infolding (UK Première)
by 5:4As i may have said previously, i have a love-hate relationship with film scores. Being something of a movie addict, i’m obviously encountering them all the time, and at their best, i adore how they don’t merely accompany the on-screen drama but contain their own distinctive parallel narrative, interesting in …
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Until i began spending time with George Benjamin‘s new Concerto for Orchestra, given its first performance at last Monday’s Prom concert, i hadn’t realised how tired i’d become with narrative. Not that there’s anything wrong or even problematic about the concepts and conceits that have festooned each of the new …
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Last Friday brought the first UK performance of the shortest, and by far the simplest, of this year’s Proms premières, Charlotte Bray‘s Where Icebergs Dance Away. Coming in the wake of some highly complex new works (none more so than George Lewis’ Minds in Flux) this was rather refreshing. In …
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FestivalsPremières
Proms 2021: Bernard Hughes – Birdchant; Nico Muhly – A New Flame (after Sweelinck); Shiva Feshareki – Aetherworld (World Premières)
by 5:4More Proms premières, more demands that composers must ‘respond’ to existing music. Perhaps by now the Proms organisers regard this approach as an integral, even defining, part of its commissioning strategy, but it demonstrates a complete lack of faith and trust in composers to forge their own unique conceptions from …
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This evening’s Prom concert, in addition to new works from Bernard Hughes and Nico Muhly, features the world première of Aetherworld by UK composer Shiva Feshareki. It’s a rare and very welcome instance of an electroacoustic work of contemporary music at the Proms, and in preparation for it here are Shiva’s answers …
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Tomorrow evening’s Prom concert given by the BBC Singers features three world premières, one of which is Birdchant by British composer Bernard Hughes. By way of an introduction to the piece, here are his answers to my pre-première questions, together with his programme note for the piece. Many thanks to Bernard …
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Last night’s Proms performance of Thomas Adès‘ The Exterminating Angel Symphony wasn’t a première (a so-called “London première” is not a première!) so i’m not technically including it as part of my annual survey of the season’s new works, but there’s a couple of good reasons to say a little …
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Last night the 2021 Proms season began, featuring – as has been the custom for many years – the world première of a new piece. When Soft Voices Die is a choral work by Scottish composer James MacMillan that brings together two texts by Shelley, Mutability (also known as ‘The …
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Three years ago, the Proms festival featured the first complete performance of The Brandenburg Project, a large-scale undertaking by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, who commissioned six composers to write a work responding to one of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, with the aim that they should ideally also use the …
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It’s always exciting when a new album of music by Natasha Barrett appears, and it feels like it’s been a long wait since her last release, the dazzling Puzzle Wood (one of my Best Albums of 2017), came out four years ago. While that album explored her earlier output – …
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The act of listening, at its best, often seems to suggest a form of ‘inhabiting’ the music, and that’s particularly true of Splitting, a new 26-minute work by UK composer Paul Obermayer. i’ll come back to this a bit later. It’s perhaps best to start not at the beginning but …
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CD/Digital releases
Listening, isolated: solo music by Brian Ferneyhough, Sam Hayden, Olga Neuwirth, Rebecca Saunders and Salvatore Sciarrino
by 5:4Considering that most of us have been spending the last 12 months in varying forms of isolation, it seems a fitting time to focus on music for solo instruments. German label Kairos clearly feels the same way, as they’ve recently brought out a short series of five albums, each titled …
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i’ve been catching up with the latest pair of releases from the always interesting Neu Records label. In the process, i’ve been contemplating the fact that both of them pull the rug out from under you in terms of what’s certain and uncertain about the music, which often appears to …