Mark Anthony Turnage's Frieze – performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, on 11 August – and Nashit Kahn's The Gate of the Moon, a concerto for sitar and orchestra – performed by Kahn himself with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton on 12 August – both raise the question of how, in a new piece, one can meaningfully reference other music. Turnage's work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society to celebrate the organisation's bicentennial and to share a programme as their most famous and, probably, greatest commission, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony; this shorter work, which is clearly modelled on the Beethoven in its general layout, is a sort of gloss in Turnage's own language on the older one. Kahn's concerto brings together an orchestra of western instruments and a single Indian one and aims at joining their indigenous musical languages in a meaningful way.
