Paul was Reviews Editor at Bachtrack from 2012 to February 2014. He has written on music and culture for publications including Culture Wars, the Huffington Post, the Independent and the Guardian. He holds BA and MPhil degrees in music from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and is particularly passionate about contemporary music of all types. His website is here.
Was Rufus Wainwright made for the Proms? Quite possibly: he ticks all the boxes needed for the ideal late-night set. He’s a pop artist, yes, but a pop artist whose love of classical music.
The Iceland Symphony Orchestra give an assured performance in their debut concert at the Proms, most successfully in the new compositions of their compatriots.
With murky machinations in the low strings and piercing, vivid woodwind solos above, Harrison Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird and Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major have surprisingly similar openings.
There was a collaborative spirit underlying this performance with the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano, joined for a brilliant Brahms concerto by Janine Jansen. Walton's First Symphony and a Peter Maxwell Davies fanfare also marvelled.
Vladimir Jurowski put in a surprise appearance at the harpsichord at the start of this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert, which saw Leonidas Kavakos join the orchestra for concertos by Bach and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. But it was the Eroica that drew the strongest performance.
You might think you know what a piano looks and sounds like, but these designs will make you think again. Here are five of the most unusual piano designs ever to hit the market.
Playing the keys? With your fingers? How passé. Composers have been experimenting with novel piano-playing techniques for over a century now. Here are a few highlights from a hundred years of bizarre things you can get up to with your piano.
Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a programme of Russian music with star soloist Evgeny Kissin, whose Tchaikovsky concerto partially fulfilled expectations, but not more.
The London première of Georg Friedrich Haas' cult phenomenon in vain was given as part of Southbank Centre's The Rest is Noise festival, by London Sinfonietta and conductor Emilio Pomàrico – a rhetorically brilliant performance.
Violist Antoine Tamestit didn’t seem like much a soloist at the opening of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy on Tuesday night, in Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra’s second performance of this programme at the Barbican. His viola lolling casually at his side, Tamestit gazed pleasantly at the orchestra, nodding along with them from time to time.
The Southbank’s The Rest is Noise continues to draw the crowds, although the promise of Steve Reich himself can’t have made this concert too hard to sell. Reich’s own contribution to this evening, the culmination of a weekend of music and events entitled “Superpower”, was limited to some clapping and letting go of a microphone.
Despite the frequency with which the two composers are compared, Thomas Adès’ music seldom sounds very much like that of Benjamin Britten. But Adès has an uncanny knack of performing Britten’s music in such a way that it resembles his own.
With a debut opera for ENO in the pipeline for next year and residencies with both Wigmore Hall and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, things are currently looking bright for Julian Anderson. To celebrate this, Wigmore Hall turned 2 November into Julian Anderson Day, devoting two concerts and a talk to exploring his music.
Irvine Arditti is turning 60 this year, but the real landmark perhaps comes next year, when his eponymous string quartet turns 40. The astonishing amount of good they have done contemporary music in this time deserves a ton of celebration in 2014.
Bachtrack is asking the same six questions to many composers this month as part of its focus on contemporary music. Here’s what Bent Sørensen had to say.
