Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham | reviews, news & interviews
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Tokyo composer turned American has style that looks medieval but sounds modern
Monday, 14 March 2011
Oliver Knussen: A career devoted too selflessly to other people’s music
This latest BCMG concert had its pleasures; and it had its irritations. Among the pleasures was a pair of works, one of them newly commissioned, by the under-performed Japanese composer Jo Kondo. The irritations were of the BBC variety: long pauses between short works while technicians in headphones faffed around with microphones and music stands, in sovereign disregard for the convenience of a large paying audience.
This latest BCMG concert had its pleasures; and it had its irritations. Among the pleasures was a pair of works, one of them newly commissioned, by the under-performed Japanese composer Jo Kondo. The irritations were of the BBC variety: long pauses between short works while technicians in headphones faffed around with microphones and music stands, in sovereign disregard for the convenience of a large paying audience.
Kondo is the inventor of a method as individual in its way as Reich’s process music or Ligeti’s micro-polyphony
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