Jonathan Russell is a London-based composer, clarinetist, conductor, and educator, active in music ranging from classical to contemporary to klezmer. He is a member of the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet and the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo, and co-founded San Francisco’s Switchboard Music Festival. He holds degrees from Harvard University and San Francisco Conservatory, and is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University.
An astonishing performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony followed the world première of James MacMillan's Viola Concerto, a haunting mixture of the old and the new. Soloist Lawrence Power joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski.
The centrepiece of Nonclassical’s “Pioneers of Percussion” festival was a rousing marathon of a concert at Scala, a large (mostly) rock venue near King’s Cross. It was a rich, varied, high-energy, happily chaotic affair that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
The second instalment of Nonclassical’s “Pioneers of Percussion” Festival last Saturday at Oval Space in east London paired two classics of the percussion repertoire with two new works, and featured the young and ambitious Multi-Story Orchestra. It is a great testament to the quality of these new works that they not only held their own, but were indeed the highlights of the evening.
What is it about percussion concerts? They always seem to have a different feeling to other shows, a palpable sense of energy, curiosity and excitement.
On Friday, 25 October, the São Paulo Symphony presented an energetic and polished performance at the Southbank Centre. Part of the “The Rest is Noise Festival” focused on 20th century music, this programme took the turbulent 1960s as its theme.
On Saturday at St James’s Church, the Nonsuch Singers presented a captivating programme titled “To the Field of Stars”. It was a compelling mix of recent and old music, predominantly works by living composers and composers from the 16th century. It culminated in the première of Gabriel Jackson’s newly commissioned work To the Field of Stars.
The current state of contemporary classical composition is a bit muddled. There are a wide variety of styles and approaches out there, and no consensus on where the cutting edge is to be found. Ensembles dedicated to performing new music must find a way to make sense of it all.
Counterpoise offered a tasteful and well-crafted concert at Kings Place on Sunday of recent works accompanied by film and still photographs. The unusual instrumentation of the ensemble (violin, saxophone, trumpet, piano) was surprisingly effective. Works for smaller subsets of the ensemble gave individual performers a chance to shine as well.
On the night of 29 December, 1940, after a brief respite over Christmas, German bombers roared back over Britain. They dropped numerous incendiary bombs on the City of London, causing massive destruction, loss of life, and uncontrollable fires that raged for days. Miraculously, St Paul’s Cathedral survived the onslaught intact, even as much of the surrounding neighbourhood was reduced to rubble.
