London Sinfonietta
igor.toronyilalic
"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 reason part of Ray Davies's Meltdown series at the Southbank). Birtwistle and his former partner-in-crime Peter Maxwell Davies - and their feral musical creations - used also to be very good at running foul of the musical establishment. For some reason, Sirs, Harrison Birtwistle, CH, and Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE, Master of the Queen's Music, don't Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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 stick insect, taking to his instrument with two bows.
At Spitalfields Church on Monday night, James Weeks and the New London Chamber Choir set about raising our spirits with three early American anthems by William Billings (1746-1800). How vigorous the round Wake Ev'ry Breath felt, as the choir filed in one by one, unleashing the wave upon wave Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...
theartsdesk
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 change the musical landscape of Britain forever. So here to point them in the right direction, theartsdesk's merry band of regulars - Edward Seckerson, David Nice, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson, Stephen Walsh and Ismene Brown - separate the wheat from the chaff in this round-up of the best and worst concerts, opera, musical Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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 Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You can do that? With that! And you're going to stick that where?! We were an audience of gawpers and grimacers, smilers and starers. Who knew that so much could be done with the back of a violin? Or that the metallic screw at the heel of the bow could play little melodies Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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 Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah - and is carved out of a dark, unforgiving orchestra and a suffocating choral weave. For the atheist, if not for those of a religious bent who might prefer the succour of François Couperin or Thomas Tallis's settings, there can be no better depiction of the asphyxiation of despair. Last night's rendition Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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 that seemed to elevate the garden-shed accident into some kind of art form, you have two people to blame: Adolf Hitler and Edgar Varèse.Hitler's influence we shall come to another time. Edgar Varèse's impact was on display this weekend at the Southbank's retrospective, Varèse 360°. Everyone from Frank Zappa to Harrison Birtwistle have Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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 to his prolifically combustible music, the million and one ideas hurtling about with the energy of a school playground and the intensity of a burning sun, and you soon realise that all that cranial space is probably quite necessary.
But for composition you need more than just head space for musical ideas to smash into one another. You need form. Read more ...