Thomas Adès continued his Beethoven cycle with the Britten Sinfonia in a superb performance of Beethoven's Sixthpaired with Barry’s marmite piece The Conquest of Ireland.
The latest concert in the Britten Sinfonia’s ongoing Beethoven symphony cycle also featured the London première of Gerald Barry’s combative Piano Concerto.
Glistening performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and combined forces under Thomas Adès bring to life Stravinsky’s Perséphone, with fiery premières of works by Adès himself and Gerald Barry.
Mirga's approach to Beethoven's Fifth showed a flair for innovation, the highlight of a strong programme that also featured a virtuosic performance from Leila Josefowciz of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto.
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.
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.
As a fan of contemporary music and, indeed, minimalism, I was disappointed to find the programme at Prom 50 underwhelming overall. This was not for lack of trying, however – I wanted to enjoy it. But after allowing the music time to sink in further and my thoughts to settle, my opinions only seemed to have become more resolute.The evening started promisingly.
Interviewed at the Barbican Centre last year, Stephen Fry described Gerald Barry’s score for The Importance of Being Earnest (2010) rather unfavourably as “taking a machete to a soufflé”. However, this zany opera based on Oscar Wilde’s classic play of 1895 has already emerged victorious from concert premières in Los Angeles and London.
Ensemble 7Bridges, directed by Richard Rijnvos, Head of Composition at Durham University, and conducted by James Weeks, brings together some of the North East’s specialist professional performers of contemporary music, supported by Durham University, with the aim of contributing to the development of new music in the North East.
Anyone who worries for the health of contemporary composition obviously wasn’t at the Southbank Centre this Sunday, where the London Sinfonietta presented a whole afternoon and evening’s worth of new music in and around the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
During the first half of this London Sinfonietta concert, I scribbled the phrase 'Lightly anarchic streak' in my notes, referring to the formal daring and the conspicuous rock music influence evident in various pieces.
The Importance of Being Earnest is Gerald Barry’s fourth full-length opera; his previous three have set texts much more at home in the opera world than this ambitious libretto from Wilde’s famous play.
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.
