contemporary classical
igor.toronyilalic
The most interesting thing about Louis Andriessen's musical snapshot of the famous eroticist Anaïs Nin - being given its UK premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night - was that the scene on the chaise longue in which Nin (Cristina Zavalloni) simulates riding her father was nowhere near the most unsettling episode. As ever, De Staat, the Dutch composer's seminal 1970s orchestral work of superabundant rhetorical fury took first prize in knocking the stuffing out of us.The orchestral palette alone was something to behold: three electric guitars and two fat brass bands at its core Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of the most exciting Western classical music being composed today comes from the Far East. Composers from Japan and South Korea - possibly because they find themselves in a different intellectual cycle to us in the West - seem to be able to do things we can't. The BBC Symphony Orchestra dedicated one of their Total Immersion series to Korean Unsuk Chin, an unconventional Modernist whose relationship to melody and storytelling is refreshingly unashamed, but who, on the evidence of the rows of empty seats at the Barbican Hall (there were quite literally more people on stage than in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.The main work on the disc is the recent song cycle Troubairitz - Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Could you get a more American string quartet than the Emersons? They dress like Yanks. They play like Yanks. They're even shaped like Yanks. There's Steve Martin on viola, Steve Buscemi on cello, Laurel and Hardy on violins. The night started in true Stateside fashion, an announcer indicating the Emersons would be conducting a Q&A session from the stage after the concert. I can't imagine anyone took them up on the offer. Because, for all the trials and tribulations of their recital last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (some good, some bad), this wasn't a performance that needed Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I reviewed excerpts of Will Gregory's new opera, Piccard in Space, last year. His funky, plushly Moog-ed, concerto-like suite struck me as rather tasty. I even said that I couldn't wait for last night's fully worked-out operatic world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. How wrong I was.I've seen plenty of bad opera in my time. I've seen things that have offended my ears. Things that have offended my eyes. Things so nauseatingly rubbishy they panzer-attacked my nasal cavities and asphyxiated my soul. But nothing has made me want to pick out my cochlea with a blunt 50-page electronica guide Read more ...
marcus.odair
Forget Lady Gaga – Mica Levi, aka Micachu, is modern pop’s true maverick. More likely to sport jeans and T-shirt than frock of flesh, she’s a skinny, scruffy tomboy who can hold her own in a game of keepie-uppie. Her take on music is similarly unassuming, but it’s also, genuinely, extraordinary. Debut album Jewellery, originally recorded for Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label but then snapped up by Rough Trade, deserved to be classed as pop, in her own eyes, because it comprised “short songs, with choruses and verses”. But its wonky and defiantly lo-fi tunes, hammered out on a tiny, charity- Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Colin Davis's year has not been a happy one. There've been heart problems, cancellations and, during a performance of The Magic Flute at Covent Garden last month, a major fall. Last night at the Barbican Hall he faced a strenuous Beethoven programme, the Third Piano Concerto with Jonathan Biss and the Seventh Symphony, and a new work by Romanian Vlad Maistorovici. Would the 83-year old conductor have enough energy to inject proceedings with the required welly?There was as much welly as you could wish for. Understandably, he had assigned the mastery of Maistorovici's Halo to an undertsudy Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Like so much fine music, Gerald Barry's new work began life as detritus. Feldman's Sixpenny Editions, which received its world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, are elaborations on the tacky little Edwardian jingles whose browning dog-eared scores are still to be found in music shops up and down the land selling in big plastic buckets for 5p. This - "as well as other kinds of trash", Barry admits in his tip-top programme notes - was the music he first grew to love. And out of these dearly beloved sows' ears, he's made eight extraordinary silk purses.Unusually for such Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.I needn't have. The day was a revelation. As is usual with these BBC Symphony Orchestra composer portraits, many different ways into the composer's oeuvre were proferred. The first reductivist Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Being a composer of contemporary classical music is a treacherous business. It's about the only art form in which stylistic choices can still force a creator into permanent exile. Two composers who have fallen foul of the British house style in recent decades and have sought musical asylum in America and Europe, Brian Ferneyhough and James Clarke, were receiving an extremely rare London premiere of their new string quartets at the Wigmore Hall last night. And you could see why Britain had shown them the door.James Clarke's Second String Quartet (2009) was thrillingly, almost treasonably, un- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Based on a short story by Gogol, Alexander Medvedev’s libretto for Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Portrait was originally conceived for Shostakovich. It was subsequently passed to Weinberg, who finished his opera in 1980. It’s a bleak, Faustian tale of a struggling artist who buys the eponymous painting, after which material success is mirrored by moral collapse.You can’t help making comparisons between Weinberg’s musical style and that of his mentor. It’s audible in the staccato wind writing and angular string lines in the first act. Weinberg’s gift is for suggesting character with the most Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There had been murmurings that his star had dimmed. That Gustavo Dudamel's partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (greeted with such fanfare in 2009) had yet to set the West Coast on fire. Had this Icarus flown too high? Would their debut visit to the Barbican last night resemble Breughel's fall, Latino legs flailing in an orchestral sea? Not a bit of it.Admittedly, we had to wait until the second half for something truly special to happen. The first half didn't really give Dudamel much chance to show off any of his many talents. In the John Adams opener, Slonimsky's Earbox (1995), Read more ...