vocal

About a year-and-a-half ago, in the summer of 2022, i emailed the Swedish label BIS to ask whether they might at some point box up all of their individual releases of Allan Pettersson‘s symphonies. (At the time i was immersed in the box set released by CPO, featuring all of …

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). …

Ambient modes of expression, and listening, were brought to bear on two large-scale works during my long weekend at HCMF, both by Lithuanian composers. The less successful of the two was Hadal Zone by Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, which sought to be an hour-long sonic descent into the most abyssal oceanic depths. …

The experience of Christina Kubisch‘s electromagnetic walk around Oslo’s library had a counterpart in her new vocal work, Strømsanger (“electrical singers”), premièred by Trondheim Voices. The piece originated in the electromagnetic sounds made by Trondheim’s tram system; these became the basis for transcriptions that Kubisch developed further. Lasting around 40 …

Staunch conservatives don’t merely hold sway over our current government but also, it seems, our concert halls, judging by the latest desolation of premières at this year’s Proms. In the case of the Prelude and Fugue in G major by Rachel Laurin, posthumously premièred in Isabelle Demers’ organ recital, i …

Very few performances at Only Connect 2023 failed to impress. Among the exceptions was Caminante by Michael Pisaro, premièred on the opening night by Trondheim Sinfonietta with bassist Michael Francis Duch. Though the work began well, establishing a nicely darkened texture that became almost gritty and dirty, as soon as …

None of Galina Ustvolskaya‘s five symphonies are particularly well-known. That’s also true for most of her output, but it’s particularly true of the symphonies, which are rarely performed and even more rarely recorded. Her First Symphony is perhaps the most obscure of them all. Composed in 1955, the work is …

Seaming To is an English singer and musician whose work seems to be the product of, to date, three distinct periods of activity. She was a guest vocalist on some singles in the early 2000s, followed by her own first EP, Soda Slow, in 2006. Then things went quiet until …

One of the more memorable works performed at the inaugural Baltic Music Days in 2020 was Mundus Invisibilis by Latvian composer Anna Fišere (formerly Ķirse). That piece was concerned with fungal mycelium, and her earlier work Radices for 8 singers and electronics, composed in 2018, is similarly rooted in the …

This year’s composer in residence at HCMF, Lisa Streich, was represented by an appropriately large number of performances, allowing for a pretty deep dive into her musical thinking. If i say that a lot of what i heard of Streich’s music was more intriguing than immediately enjoyable, i need to …

In 2018, when exploring the music of Rebecca Saunders in that year’s Lent Series, i made the following remark regarding recordings of her music: The fact that i’ve explored Rebecca Saunders’ recorded output over four articles suggests that she’s well represented by recordings of her work. But almost half of …

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 …

i’m concluding my coverage of this year’s Ultima festival with something that – over a week since it took place – i’m still grappling with in terms of what i experienced as well as, quite simply, what to call it. On 17 September a marathon was being run through the …

Voices returned to contemporary music at the Proms on Wednesday evening, with the first performance of Matthew Kaner‘s new vocal work Pearl. The piece, for baritone and orchestra, takes its title from the Middle English poem Pearl, written by the anonymous Gawain Poet, setting portions of the text from Simon …

It’s a real pleasure to be able to present another instalment in my ongoing occasional series The Dialogues. This time, my guest is UK composer Naomi Pinnock, whose music has been a persistent highlight on my radar for the last decade or so. We’d been talking about recording this for …

One of the more beguiling albums i heard in 2020 was Flood Dream by New York duo LEYA. That being said, at the time i wasn’t at all sure what to make of it, except that it left me intrigued, fascinated and, in a way that i couldn’t really articulate, …

Curating this year’s Lent Series, focusing on death, grief and loss, has been something of a difficult experience. As i mentioned at the start of the series, this theme has felt unavoidable and inevitable at the moment, but at the same time works such as the ones i’ve featured, that …

The Lent Series continues today with a short, darkly ruminative work for baritone and ensemble by British composer Colin Matthews. It’s a setting of the poem ‘It rains’ by war poet Edward Thomas, one of two poems that Thomas composed in 1917 concerned with rain. ‘It rains’ is a wistful …

Postponed from its usual position in late January to early March due to last-minute Covid restriction shenanigans, Iceland’s Dark Music Days festival was therefore not quite so dark as usual. All the same, it was hardly the Light Music Days, and in any case Mother Nature was seemingly more determined …

Five years ago i was getting excited by an album of orchestral music by a Chinese composer previously unknown to me, Xiaogang Ye. That excitement has been rekindled recently by the coincidentally-timed release of three new albums of Ye’s music in the last few weeks, which together provide an excellent …