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 …
violin concerto
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CD/Digital releasesLent Series
Allan Pettersson – Complete Edition: First major works, 1949-51
by 5:4Concerto No. 1 for Violin and String Quartet (1949) Arriving at Allan Pettersson’s first violin concerto comes as something of a shock. On the one hand, it continues the composer’s focus on chamber music that dates back to his earliest pieces, as well as his exploration of counterpoint, which was …
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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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Sunday evening’s Prom included the European première (so nice to see Britain still regarded as being in Europe) of Missy Mazzoli‘s new Violin Concerto. Parenthetically subtitled ‘Procession’, the work is something of a response to the time of lockdown, examining, in Mazzoli’s words “how we use music and ritual to …
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Any kind of sound processing – human, mechanical, digital – is a response of some kind: taking a signal, possibly analysing it, before doing something with it or to it. The latest new work at the Proms, Jonny Greenwood‘s Horror vacui, takes this as its starting point and modus operandi. …
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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 …