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Emily Howard's new opera, an Aldeburgh Festival commission, takes an ambitiously modernist approach to a dystopian story of loneliness: a tough, but thought-provoking work. 

The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group present an ambitious mixture of experimental chamber music and disquieting monodrama. 

Oliver Knussen and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group excel in a cunningly linked group of works from the old (mid 1980s) to the brand new.

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.

Lean yet nuanced performances from Oliver Knussen and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in commemoration of Harrison Birtwistle's 80th birthday

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are masterful, but chamber works lack context during the birthday celebrations at Milton Court.

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.

“All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.” So says one of the two singers in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Into the Little Hill, performed to perfection in Wigmore Hall by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group this Saturday.

The works featured in this concert, composed in 1912 and 1941, might be considered rather old fare for Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, but they remain as startlingly original today as they must have seemed back then. It was a pleasure to hear them in the brand new Elgar Concert Hall at the University of Birmingham in all its shiny, wooden splendour.

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.

I love eating out, yet I hate cooking programmes. It is perhaps for the same reason that I’m suspicious of ‘Music and Conversation’ events. Whilst interested in the process and the thoughts of composers, I’d rather these were presented on their own without feeling that the ‘conversation’ part of the concert explains the ‘performance’ part.