thu 05/12/2024

London Sinfonietta

Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King/ Birtwistle's Secret Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall

World premiere performance of Maxwell Davies's 'Eight Songs' with Roy Hart

"I used to be able to run down these," whispered a wobbly 77-year-old Harrison Birtwistle to friends as he stumbled down the stairs to the Queen Elizabeth Hall stage to take his bow at last night's London Sinfonietta concert (for some inexplicable...

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Eliane Radigue/New London Chamber Choir, London Sinfonietta, James Weeks, Spitalfields Music

Drone music pioneer Eliane Radigue: A winningly modest presence at her first UK retrospective last night

What strange goings-on at this year's Spitalfields Music festival. One church is set ablaze by a female laptop trio; another is swamped by 17th-century collectivists; one man opens up a black hole with the back of his guitar; and a harpist becomes a...

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London Sinfonietta, Atherton, Queen Elizabeth Hall

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...

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Unsuk Chin Day, Barbican

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...

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London Sinfonietta, Adès, Queen Elizabeth Hall

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...

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Year Out/Year In: Classical Music and Opera

Earlier this month, George Osborne, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were spotted in a Royal Opera House box surveying the country's most expensive artistic patrimony. What they thought - and how they and the Arts Council might wield their axe - will...

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Lachenmann Weekend, Southbank Centre

Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the...

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London Sinfonietta, Atherton, BBC Singers, Royal Albert Hall

The Tenebrae service of Maundy Thursday sees Satan's removal men take over holy duties. Crosses are veiled, lights are extinguished, songs of wailing erupt. Stravinsky's Threni (receiving its Proms debut last night) is a setting of these wails - the...

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Varèse 360°, Southbank

For those of you who think that classical music ends with Mahler - or Brahms just to be on the safe side - that the musical experimentation of the past 60 years was some sort of grim continental joke, an extended whoopee cushion of a musical period...

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Wolfgang Rihm Day, Barbican

Wolfgang Rihm: 'Sod the Hadron Collidor. You want a decent particle-smasher? Look no further than Wolfgang Rihm's brain.'

It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen...

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