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When is a work actually finished ? Only when composer, publisher, editors and performers agree that it is... Sakari Oramo conducts the London premiere of Knussen's Cleveland Pictures. 

Daniel Pioro reminds us of the qualities of Oliver Knussen's Violin Concerto, while Vasily Petrenko and the LPO see a pair of second symphonies in very different ways.

Altogether it was the sort of music Gerard Hoffnung might have composed if he had ever held a serious music festival.

Vladimir Jurowski conducts Tchaikovsky, Britten and Scriabin viewed through Oliver Knussen's palette to open the London Philharmonic's 2019-20 season. 

The Knussen Chamber Orchestra with Ryan Wigglesworth debuts at the Proms with music by Knussen, Birtwistle, Waley-Cohen, Abrahamsen and Putt.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla brings Mieczysław Weinberg to the Proms, in a daring programme including Dorothy Howell and Oliver Knussen. 

The Orchestra of the Royal Academy of Music and The Julliard School, with Edward Gardner in an impressively ambitious programme, with tragic Britten from James Ehnes, and a remarkable UK premiere from Anna Thorvaldsdottir.

Two world premieres from Mark Bowden and Colin Matthews breath life into the Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Marking the centenary of the end of the First World War, Anna Meredith and 59 Productions' work proves a powerful, often surprisingly upbeat, commission.

Simon Rattle returns to the UK in a (self-)portrait concert with the London Symphony Orchestra showcasing contemporary music

This week’s subscription concerts of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra featured only British music that was composed in the last century; three very different works in terms of compositional approach and musical language.

After Knussen's Flourish with Fireworks, a program of mighty works from the early 20th century find Spano and the ASO on superb form.

As part of the New York Philharmonic’s CONTACT new music series at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Esa-Pekka Salonen drew connections among Olivier Messiaen, two of his students (Pierre Boulez and George Benjamin) and one outlier (Oliver Knussen).

Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic framed Leonidas Kavakos’s searching account of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto with the sensory pleasures of Scriabin.

The Britten Oboe Quartet gave highly engaging and communicative performances of an imaginative and intelligent programme, with cerebral serialism from Elisabeth Lutyens combined with early Elgar, Britten and sublime Mozart to finish.

Arcomis is a Cardiff-based organisation concerned with the promotion and commissioning of new music. Modest yet effective, most of their work is at an essential grass-root level, yet, seemingly out of nowhere, they have conjured an incredibly bold and wide-ranging three-day festival of brass based at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall, the Cardiff University Music Department and the Royal Welsh College of

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season, and as it does so it is marking the anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. BCMG is touring a programme of Britten’s early compositions, the second stop of which was at Turner Sims in Southampton.John Woolrich, BCMG Artist-in-Association, was introduced as a “master programmer” by the Turner Sims representative.

This month the BBC’s Total Immersion series celebrated the 60th birthday of British composer Oliver Knussen. A sensitively devised programme given at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Sunday featured five works composed between the 1970s and the 1990s.

While there’s no reason that a children’s opera should be simple or easy, there’s no real need for it to be difficult either. So I was a little confused going into the Barbican’s performance of Oliver Knussen’s brilliant brace of Maurice Sendak adaptations this Saturday, which was surrounded, despite the works’ subject matter, with a slightly unbecoming aura of seriousness.

The memory has dimmed somewhat in the past few years. But it remains firmly entrenched in my mind. I wish I could say that this moment was a formative one in my development as musicologist; that destiny took hold of this young boy and led him to the path of his eventual vocation. But no such thing happened.

When Stravinsky brought his radical ballet Petrushka to Vienna in 1912, the composer recounts in his autobiography, the orchestra was full of complaints about the demands of the score. Disillusioned by this, Stravinsky found comfort from the unlikely figure of the man who raised and lowered the stage curtains. “Don’t let’s be downhearted”, he said, “I’ve been here for 55 years...

In days gone by, if you went to see a Mahler Symphony, you wouldn't feel you’d had the full experience unless Gustav himself was waving the baton. Nowadays the privilege of watching a composer conduct his own work is a somewhat rarer one, though fortunately not yet a completely extinct practice, and watching Knussen’s Symphony No.

Oliver Knussen’s music is all about exquisiteness and elegance – not words to describe Mahler’s at the best of times, but maybe his Seventh Symphony least of all, with its odd, lumbering structure, coarse trills and abrupt changes of pace.

Gloria Cheng is an uncommon artist. A specialist in contemporary piano literature, she has made a career championing new music and performing programs of adventurous (which is to say, esoteric) works. She is a frequent collaborator with some of the leading lights of contemporary music, including Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

It must be heart-warming for a young composer, sharing the bill with Beethoven and Stravinsky, to know that the programme has been named after her piece. The clear, confident writing in Helen Grime's A Cold Spring (2009) effectively conveyed the visual contrast offered by sharp-edged, bright days at this time of year.

For one of the most iconic works in the art music repertoire, The Rite of Spring actually isn’t performed very often. This week it made a welcome appearance on a New York Philharmonic program under the baton of British conductor Daniel Harding. It turned out to be the main event of an otherwise routine evening.The concert opened with a short work by Oliver Knussen, Flourish with Fireworks.

The London Sinfonietta presented a fascinatingly diverse programme for this concert, one of three themed ‘Remix’ evenings at King’s Place in collaboration with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Both ensembles are renowned for their expertise in music of a particular period, but this evening the stylistic boundaries were rather more blurred.