contemporary classical
igor.toronyilalic
It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen to his prolifically combustible music, the million and one ideas hurtling about with the energy of a school playground and the intensity of a burning sun, and you soon realise that all that cranial space is probably quite necessary.
But for composition you need more than just head space for musical ideas to smash into one another. You need form. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The new millennium shimmered into earshot with a musical masterpiece from a female Finn. Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (2000) appeared to open up an enticing new operatic sound world, less dogmatic, more instinctive, colourful and intense, very much like the work's model, Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande, had done a hundred years before. Ten years on, the critical establishment descended on Lyon for Saariaho's third opera, Émilie - which comes to the Barbican in 2012 - based on the last days of the life of 18th-century French intellectual, Émilie du Châtelet, to see if Saariaho could repeat Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much consequence, of as much wonder, as any offered up by the classic pantheon. That that which the people respond to must and usually does have plenty of merit lurking within it. And so I have always held out hope that Philip Glass, the most popular of living classical composers, is actually quite good, somehow, somewhere. But, actually, he really isn Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
To find a single completely successful piece in a contemporary music programme is rare enough. The sieve of time has yet to separate the wheat from the chaff. But to find complete satisfaction in all five pieces programmed, and for all five pieces programmed to be by the same composer, is a testament to one thing: that George Benjamin is a total genius. I am not the first to have noticed this. The six-year-old Benjamin was Messiaen's favourite pupil. They are pictured above; a white-haired Messiaen is sat in the middle next to a bashfully bushy-haired Benjamin.At 20, while still a student, he Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Had a dastardly dirty bomb gone off in the Wigmore Hall last night and turned us all to dust, the contemporary British classical music scene would, in one fell swoop, have been wiped off the map. No more Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Julian Anderson, Simon Bainbridge or Oliver Knussen, all of whom were gathered for the inaugural concert of the year-long residency at the hall of rising compositional star Luke Bedford (above) . This was a fascinating programme, delivered without fault by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Knussen. Most fascinating Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Not everyone was playing for the same team in last night's revival production of The Rake's Progress. On the one side were the conductor, choir and soloists, all focused in their service and submission to unravelling this quietly brilliant piece of neoclassicism by Stravinsky - mostly pretty effectively. On the other side were the sets and direction of Carl Fillon and Robert Lepage, which included blow-up caravans, fold-out dolls' houses and a mattress-cum-Hoover sucking in lovers. Attention-seeking stuff . An initial interested "ooh" become a more circumspect "oh?"; bored eyes gave Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
In 2005, having completed the first act of his opera Phaedra and killed off his lead Hippolyte, Hans Werner Henze contracted a mystery illness. No one understood it or saw a way out of it. He stopped eating, then speaking. His eyes began to fail him. He fell into a coma. The musical world began to fly out to his Italian village outside Rome to pay their last respects and prepare for his funeral. Then, two inert months into the grief and the start of the obsequies, Henze "just stood up", and went back to work on the second act of Phaedra, in which Hippolyte returns from the dead.
Needless to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a brilliant moment in the film that began Henze Day yesterday. An ageing Henze, lazying on his Italian veranda, his leg cocked, his bald head - looking as if it had been iced - stuffed into a boater, is confronted by his lurcher dog, James. "Jamez," wheezes Henze, "Vat is it, honey? You vant to sit on my lap? Sis is impossible. Ve are at vork." It's an instructive little episode, a neat glimpse into the winning side of the German composer. The Dr Doolittle side: engagingly sweet, relaxed, flirtatious, interested in the right things; interested in extending a hand to history, to Read more ...