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A masterful performance of Boulez's Notations crown a memorable evening rich delights, including rapturous Debussy and three very fine world premieres. 

The third concert of A Festival of New Music also suggests the conflicts and split personalities which may come from extended isolation. 

Olga Neuwirth’s complex but arresting Masaot / Clocks Without Hands opened the program, but it was the orchestra’s Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 that the audience will remember for the overpowering effect of this performance.

Listening to Grisey's Quatre Chants two decades after its composition, it is clear that he was on a threshold into a new approach to dramatic vocal music.

A commanding performance of six pieces from as many composers – all either new, nearly new or rare classics. 

At the Lucerne Festival, composer Olga Neuwirth, Ensemble Contemporain and a sound team from IRCAM recently shone in a theatrical performance of an complex and ocean shore-inspired score.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Maestro Gergiev, showed off their brilliant versitility, and gave us a taste of Wagner's Ring.

John Woolrich's Songbook project provided the vocal material on show at the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group recital at Wigmore Hall, featuring sopranos Gillian Keith and Rebecca von Lipinski.

When it comes to contemporary music, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) has made great strides in their ten-year history, premièing over 500 compositions and performing not only in New York and Chicago but in venues all over the world.

As I write this, I have just realised that someone in a neighbouring flat is listening to some rather loud jazz, a man is shouting outside, probably at the car alarm that has just gone off, and there is a bee buzzing around my room.

The Klangforum Wien is such a disciplined ensemble that for them ever to be remotely fazed or challenged by a piece, even those works with Ferneyhough-like unfulfillable demands, is scarcely imaginable.

There can't have been too many concerts ever which have started with a setting of Gertrude Stein and ended with an extra-camp version of 'Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead'. The London Sinfonietta certainly broke a barrier or two on Saturday night, that's for sure.