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Gustavo Dudamel selects a trio of works by Latin American composers for a colorful and extravagant evening at the LA Phil.

Steve Reich and Julia Wolfe feature in Colin Currie Quartet's Full Dark Ride at London's Kings Place, to launch the “Sound Unwrapped” extravaganza. 

With works by Carter, Reich, Taira and Bartók, the young percussion trio gives us a fine survey of the past century’s musical variety.

His fans presented him with not one but two impromptu birthday serenades before and after the Brahms. "I'm getting old," Gustavo admitted ruefully to his public. He's only 36. 

It takes artistic courage to devote almost a whole concert to music associated with cinema, but then Richard Tognetti, the artistic director and concert master of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, never lacked creative thinking or musical audacity. 

Ruth Mackenzie, Holland Festival’s vivacious and invigorating new director, closed her first edition with a twelve hour Prom, reinventing it as a mini-festival at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.

Piano sisters Katia and Marielle, with the help of Kalakan, a trio of basque musicians, give us varied melodies, rhythms, colours of the musical horizon. It's a concert which achieves remarkable consistency in spite of its eclectic programme.

Asko|Schönberg presents exciting new works by Wagemans and Kulenty. 

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.

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.

The Percussive Planet Ensemble was founded seven years ago, when the then 22-year-old Martin Grubinger first performed his Percussive Planet (twelve percussion pieces from around the world) at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn.

“I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music”, Steve Reich wrote in his 1968 essay Music as a Gradual Process. His music of the 1960s, from tape pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain to instrumental works like Piano Phase, employed phasing and looping techniques. These compositions are some of the first examples of both process music and downtown musical minimalism.

On Thursday night, I left a concert longing for a tranquilizer, but at Saturday night’s Man Forever/Sō Percussion concert, I began wishing for sedatives about three minutes into the first set. Before the performance, the audience sat entranced by a subtle humming drifting through the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The 1960s and 70s are famous for breakthrough developments in rock music, but the story was really no different for the field of art music during those decades. The advent of electronics seems to have instilled in composers a fresh thirst for sound-exploration and conceptual writing.

This past December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, six percussionists drummed on wooden planks for an hour in one of the most powerful performances of 2012. The six musicians of Mantra Percussion (Joe Bergen, Al Cerulo, Chris Graham, Michael McCurdy, Jude Traxler, and Nick Woodbury) were performing the New York première of Michael Gordon’s Timber, an immersive and meditative work.

Here’s a secret: on any given night in New York City and Brooklyn, groups of regular-looking people perform exceedingly difficult music in front of other regular-looking people, sometimes for one hour, sometimes for twelve.

On Saturday night, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space was the perfect location to recuperate from a stressful week. Unassigned seating, including piles of black pillows, lined all four walls of the space, with Mantra Percussion’s set-up in the center. This set-up consisted of six elevated two-by-fours arranged in a hexagon.

Over the past several years the Cleveland Orchestra has instituted a number of new concert opportunities to attract a new, younger audience, in response to the “greying” of its traditional audience base and the diminished interest in a season-long commitment to regular concerts.

The Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam’s foremost modern classical music venue, opened the music season with a day dedicated to percussion. The first concert included Stravinsky’s Suite from L’histoire du soldat (1918) and Varèse’s Ionisation (1929-31) and Hyperprism (1922-23).

Minimal music, the rhythm- and/or repetition-focused classical genre from the later 20th century, is well represented at Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. This will surely come to a climax during the 2013 edition of the biannual World Minimal Music Festival, but as Marinissen of Lunapark stated before this warm-up edition: "We just couldn't wait".

This Monday, the percussion quartet ensemblebash played the first of three concerts which they are scheduled to play this year at Kings Place in celebration of their twentieth anniversary. Over their twenty years, ensemblebash have come to be known as one of the most inventive and talented percussion groups worldwide. And they have just about earned the right to whatever typography they want.

Premier Prix au Concours Scriabine en 2024, John Gade a célébré la sortie de son disque consacré au compositeur avec un récital d'anthologie, non sans gratifier son public d'une belle surprise...

Der österreichische Multi-Perkussionist sorgt für ein Schlagzeug-Fest in der Isarphilharmonie.

Asko|Schönberg zeigt in seinem Programm die Vielschichtigkeit des kanadischen Komponisten Claude Vivier.

Amsterdam hat ein neues Festival, dessen erste Edition György Ligeti gewidmet ist, und bei dem Pierre-Laurent Aimard im Mittelpunkt des Klavierkonzertes stand.

El conjunto español dirigido por el percusionista Juanjo Guillem brilla en la sala de cámara con la música del compositor neoyorquino