Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Matthews D.

A concert built on the work of composers from Britain, Finland and Latvia formed a rewarding programme of choral, vocal and orchestral music with several gems. 

This second concert of the Clifton International Festival of Music was a sparkling gem amongst concrete presenting no less than three world premières as part of the Orgelbüchlein Project.

To those who grew up with Michael Tippett’s music and lived through the later premières, the neglect into which he has fallen and the ill-disguised contempt of many is both puzzling and distressing. The same fate befell both Sibelius and Vaughan Williams in the years following their deaths and now, fifteen years on, there is perhaps just a faint glimmer of a Tippett reappraisal on the horizon.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

A world première, a blind pianist and a timpani showdown – Prom 6, with the BBC Philharmonic and their chief conductor Juanjo Mena, was not lacking in content. The three big works commenced with David Matthews’ A Vision of the Sea, which was commissioned by the BBC for this Prom.

Benjamin Britten isn’t the only British composer with an anniversary this year, and I’m not talking about the 450-year-old John Dowland. David Matthews is 70, and a birthday concert from the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall last Tuesday presented several of his works in tribute.

This January’s Park Lane Group Young Artists Series is featuring 28 exceptional young performers over five concerts. Each concert further features a piece by a different contemporary composer each night, as well as one by an older, ‘Linked Composer’. On Monday the composer featured was Thomas Adès, who was ‘linked’ to Gerald Barry. The Muse Piano Quintet performed Barry's Piano Quartet no.