Birmingham, CBSO Centre: Alexander Goehr's ‘To These Dark Steps/The Fathers are Watching’

Tempo ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (264) ◽  
pp. 73-73
Author(s):  
Paul Conway
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
25Th Anniversary ◽  
Children’S Voices ◽  
World Premiere

A substantial new work by Alexander Goehr, lasting some 37 minutes in performance and scored for tenor solo, children's voices and ensemble, constituted the second half of the opening concert of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's 25th anniversary season. This world première of the latest BCMG ‘Sound Investment’ commission was conducted by Oliver Knussen, whose discerning advocacy of Goehr's music is deep-rooted and long established.

London, Royal Festival Hall: Steve Reich's ‘Radio Rewrite’

Tempo ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (265) ◽  
pp. 78-79
Author(s):  
Malcolm Miller
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
New Work ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
World Premiere ◽  
Eighth Decade ◽  
A Performance

Radio Rewrite, whose world première by the London Sinfonietta (who co-commissioned it) was warmly greeted by the capacity audience at the Royal Festival Hall on 5 March 2013, represents a fascinating postmodern symbiosis that attests to the veteran minimalist composer's continuing quest to cross new aesthetic boundaries in his eighth decade. It formed the centrepiece of a stunning concert, broadcast live by BBC Radio 3, which marked the first leg of a UK Reich tour that preceded the work's first USA airing (in Stanford on 16 March by the other commissioning ensemble, Alarm Will Sound). Reich concerts are occasions, and here the master himself together with percussionist David Hockings opened the programme with Clapping, then joined Sound Intermedia in their artful shaping of the amplified soundscape in a virtuoso performance by Mats Bergström of Electric Counterpoint. It was a performance of that work in Krakow in 2011, by Johnny Greenwood from the rock band Radiohead, that led to Reich's exploration and exploitation of their repertoire – notably two songs, ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ and ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ – in his new work.

Deal Summer Music Festival: David Matthews UK and World Premières

Tempo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (223) ◽  
pp. 83-85
Author(s):  
Mark Doran
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
The World ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
World Premiere

Nestling on the Kent coast between Ramsgate and Dover, the historic town of Deal is the distinctly pleasant home of a Summer Music Festival which in its 21 seasons has come to incorporate a fair amount of important contemporary music alongside more traditional offerings. This year's programme featured a welcome performance of the Seventh Piano Sonata (1956) by Harold Truscott (1914–92), marking the tenth anniversary of the death of this composer (resident in Deal from 1954); the world première of the choral work Town and Country (2002) by the Festival's new President, Kent-born Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (b.1936); and two compositions (and one arrangement) by David Matthews (b.1943), part-time Deal resident and the Festival's Artistic Director since 1989.

Tendencies and Contrasts in the Music of Henry Barraud

Tempo ◽  
1957 ◽  
pp. 31-35
Author(s):  
Claude Rostand
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
Emotional Climate ◽  
Instrumental Ensemble ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
Te Deum ◽  
Personal A ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Bear Witness

The most recent Festival of Contemporary Music at Venice brought to light a new work by Henry Barraud, a work the success of which was immediately established, not only at Venice itself but by virtue of various performances which it had during the Paris season that has just ended and which were given either as public concerts or for the “Jeunesses Musicales de France” or by radio. It is a Te Deum for chorus and instrumental ensemble dedicated to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky. Last winter, too, the Concerts Lamoureux of Paris gave the first performance of a new Symphonie pour cordes which was also received with like success by the audience and by the critics. Finally, during recent months, the Symphonie de Numance has had a number of performances on European radio stations. Here we are then, confronted by three works which bear witness to the rich and ripe maturity of a composer who is just now at the height of his powers, who has evolved an idiom which is strong and personal, a forceful and novel language of his own, an emotional climate of a very special nature, and who now exercises complete mastery in the handling of his means of expression.

Louth Contemporary Music Society, ‘We Sing for the Future’, 14–18 April 2021, online

Tempo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (298) ◽  
pp. 88-90
Author(s):  
Caroline Potter
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The Future ◽  
Minimal Music ◽  
Leo Brouwer

The Louth Contemporary Music Society festival, based in Dundalk, only six miles from the border with Northern Ireland, is now an established presence on the contemporary music scene. Thanks to its founder, Eamonn Quinn, it attracts both local musicians and major international figures and also issues CDs. This year, the programme featured a strong Irish connection and a lot of music that is quiet, meditative and minimal. Music for guitar formed another theme, with new work by the Norwegian guitarist/composer Fredrik Rasten and the Cuban Leo Brouwer.

London, Spitalfields Summer Festival: Nicola LeFanu's A Phoenix for Carla

Tempo ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (266) ◽  
pp. 87-88
Author(s):  
Jill Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Alto Flute ◽  
Sociological Factors ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Tv News ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Main Thing ◽  
World Premiere

Nicola LeFanu, prominent among Britain's woman composers, noted both for her strong lyrical style and her exploration of the use of microtonality, employed all these skills in abundance in the world première of her new piece A Phoenix for Carla at this year's Spitalfields Summer Festival. I was attracted to this work due to its being billed as portraying a theme connected with the London Riots of 2011, which lends itself to drama as well as an examination of underlying sociological factors. However, leaving aside these wider considerations, the piece was in fact a microcosm, devoted to a highly sensitive expression of empathy for the plight of flautist Carla Rees, whose Croydon Flat had been entirely destroyed by fire along with all her possessions in the August 2011 riots, it being in close proximity to the tragic burning down of the 144-year old House of Reeves furniture shop much displayed on our TV News channels at the time. Carla lost at least 10 flutes, including two Kingma Alto flutes specially made for her in the Netherlands on which she had based her international contemporary music career as leader of the digital acoustic Ensemble Rarescale, centred on bringing new music for Alto Flute to a wider audience. When interviewed in The Independent nearly a year later Carla commented on the aftermath: ‘I have good days and bad days, keeping going is the main thing. I'm really trying to focus on the positive but there's a deep sense of hurt in the middle of me which doesn't go away. An experience like this is like a reset button on your entire life’.

scholarly journals HOAMROANG SAM PRASAN: The Overture of Three Southern Cultures Concept from The Viewpoint of an Intercultural Composer and Musician

MANUSYA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Sinnapa Sarasas
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Mode I ◽  
New Work ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Intercultural Music ◽  
And Training

Abstract This article examines the process of combining three distinct traditional music cultures in Pattani, Thailand, into one piece of music. The author was the music director of the “Hoamroang Sam Prasan” (Overture: Harmony of the Three). Since the three musical traditions – Nora, Rong Ngeng and Digir Hulu, and Chinese drums ensemble – are similar yet different, the work was both easy and difficult. As someone with long experience in intercultural music, I developed a distinct way to do collaborative work. I seek to ensure musicians contribute their best to the piece, establish bonds of trust to co-operate, so they are willing to share in different ideas and training. The project drew the best from traditional musicians so they could develop new work on their own terms with their own musical abilities in a mode I call “conservative contemporary music.” Both artists and audiences could better appreciate the vitality of different musical traditions and their lively interactions more fully.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 1: 15–21 November 2013

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 75-77
Author(s):  
Sara Mohr-Pietsch
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Multi Media ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Artistic Director

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has, for many years, been the date in the UK new music calendar. Every November, friends and enemies gather under the heavy skies of a Yorkshire micro-climate to listen to, perform and discuss new work. When Graham McKenzie took over as Artistic Director six years ago, there were murmurings that it might change out of all recognition. He certainly made a few bold decisions, introducing more multi-media, cross-disciplinary elements, installations and audio walks, and moving beyond St Paul's Hall to more contemporary spaces like the blending shed at Bates Mill. He also gave the festival's branding the once-over, so that HCMF now always appears as hcmf// (perhaps a nod to the trendy Wire magazine-reading audience he was trying to attract). Little of what he instigated at the start of his tenure has changed, but if there were fears that it would spell the end of ‘proper concerts’, one needn't have worried.

Lincoln Center

Industry ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 161-189
Author(s):  
William Robin
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
Bang On A Can ◽  
Lincoln Center

When Bang on a Can first hosted their marathon concert and All-Stars recitals at Lincoln Center in 1994, critics and observers wrote about them with hyperbolic rhetoric, emphasizing how different the upstart festival was from the hallowed grounds of the Manhattan presenter. But under the direction of curator Jane Moss, Lincoln Center had begun to embrace contemporary music, representing a moment in which some of classical music’s most mainstream organizations looked to new work in the hopes of reaching new audiences. Bang on a Can, too, found new audiences at Lincoln Center; in partnering with the major institution, the organization prioritized their marketplace aims—their desire for expanding its reach—over the anti-establishment image that they had previously cultivated.

scholarly journals Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham. Causton, Usui, Žuraj, Saunders. 15 December, 2019

Tempo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (293) ◽  
pp. 86-88
Author(s):  
Edmund Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
Music Ensembles

Located at the end of a quiet side street in the middle of Birmingham, the CBSO centre is the venue for many of BCMG's concerts throughout the year. If the venue seems somewhat hidden away, concealed behind a Victorian red brick façade, the music that takes place inside is certainly not insular. As one of the world's leading contemporary music ensembles, BCMG's longstanding commitment to commissioning new work, and to fostering relationships with composers, has continued since 2016 under the artistic directorship of Stephan Meier. The final UK concert of 2019, Migrating Sounds, provides clear evidence of the ensemble's aims. Of the four works performed, Richard Causton's Transients and Vito Žuraj's Tension for two ensembles were world premieres, Rebecca Saunders’ Scar was a UK premiere, and Shiori Usui's Deep was commissioned by BCMG in 2014. The pieces by Causton and Saunders were also ‘sound investment commissions’, part funded by many individuals who, in return for their support, receive various rewards, including rehearsal and reception invitations. The concert was conducted by Michael Wendeberg.

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