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latest news/updates
Notes on music by Michael Gandolfi – Witold Lutoslawski – Arnold Schoenberg for Aldeburgh Festival 2012.
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CD liner notes on Birtwistle string quartets (Arditti Quartet/Aeon), Cage Sonatas and Interludes (Cédric Pescia/Aeon), and more string quartets by Ligeti, Pintscher, Cage and Xenakis (JACK Quartet/Wigmore Hall Live) – all out April/May 2012.
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Programme note for Helen Grime, Virga (Hallé/Mark Elder, 17 November).
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Words for new music at the 2011 BBC Proms: new works by Graham Fitkin (31 August, programme note) and Robin Holloway (4 August, composer profile).
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Three interlinked composer profiles – on the unlikely troika of Arvo Pärt, Julian Anderson and Elliott Carter – for three short concerts by the London Sinfonietta at Kings Place, London, 8 September.
Programme notes for London Sinfonietta’s Written/Unwritten concerts at Kings Place, London, 2 June & 3 June.
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Saturday 12 February, 7.30pm: pre-concert talk on Georg Friedrich Haas’s Third String Quartet In iij. Noct., Workshop Theatre, Leeds. Performance (by the Kairos Quartet) follows at 8pm.
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Tuesday 18 January 2011, 7.30pm: John Fallas in conversation with Beat Furrer, introducing London Sinfonietta concert – Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Also see written profile in concert programme (edited version here).
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‘Sounds of wonder’, on recent works by Julian Anderson, in INTO magazine (December 2010 issue, pp28–33).
Programme note on Anderson’s Heaven is Shy of Earth and profile of composer Sean Shepherd in BBC Symphony Orchestra concert programme for Barbican, 26 November.
Profile of Helen Grime commissioned for BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra programme, 2 December.
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I spent the week of 6–13 September in Amsterdam as an observer at Gaudeamus Music Week. Congratulations to Marko Nikodijević, winner of the 2010 Gaudeamus Prize, on whose music I’ll be writing next year.
I also spent 23–26 September in and around Essen, Germany as a guest of the RUHR.2010 City of Culture programme and its Henze-Projekt. A report follows in Opera Now magazine.
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Thursday 15 July 2010, 3–4.30pm: John Fallas in conversation with Martin Butler, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Silk Street, Barbican, London. All welcome: free admission, including chamber concert at 1pm.
Also see article ‘Songs in haunted daylight’: Martin Butler at 50
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Torsten Rasch composer profile in programme book for ENO/Punchdrunk collaboration The Duchess of Malfi (world premiere production: 13–24 July, Great Eastern Quay, Royal Albert Basin, London E16)
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programme notes for Vienna Lost and Found: the music of Kurt Schwertsik (Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, 23–24 February 2010), featuring works by Schwertsik and by H K Gruber:
Kurt Schwertsik (1935–): Singt, meine Schwäne (Sing, my swans)
The text, like that of shâl-i-mâr and of several other works by both Schwertsik and Gruber, is by the Viennese poet H.C. Artmann (1921–2000). It is a poem of lost love, rich in imagery, to which Schwertsik responds with musical imagery of an appropriately autumnal richness. But swans, as an old legend tells us, sing most eloquently in the evening of their lives, and perhaps under the surface another story is being told here too – of music sung out of twilight zones, of the eternally necessary and eternally surprising conjunction of belatedness and creativity. Now, at 75, such thoughts take on additional relevance for Schwertsik, ever young and ever making old songs into new.
[also see programme notes here and here, and Schwertsik profile in INTO magazine, February 2010 (pp20–26)]
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from the Aldeburgh Festival 2010 programme book (Webern/Stravinsky/ Castiglioni/Stockhausen – Britten-Pears Composers Ensemble cond. Hugh Brunt, 18 June 2010):
After the Second World War, Webern’s music achieved a centrality which it had never known in his lifetime. Epitaphium was written in response to a request from Pierre Boulez for a short piece that might be included in a concert of works by Webern, and Stravinsky was no doubt pleased at the opportunity to align himself both with the older, departed master and with the already influential young composer-conductor. The three instruments never play together, but instead present a succession of self-contained phrases – each consisting of 12 or 24 notes, so that the piece wears its serial structure on its sleeve perhaps even more self-consciously than does Webern’s own music. The alternation of these phrases between the high wind duo and the harp, which inhabits a contrastingly low register throughout, further suggests a set of funerary responses, and Stravinsky designated the piece as a memorial to Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg, recently deceased benefactor of the Donaueschingen Festival (which Stravinsky had visited in both the previous two years, 1957 and 1958). But perhaps the specific dedication is less important than the way the piece takes its place in a characteristic late Stravinskian world of ritualised lament. So many of the works of his last decade are private/public memorials – to Raoul Dufy, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, J.F. Kennedy – and the permutations of pitch encouraged by serial technique as Stravinsky conceived it give the music a gentle stateliness, like changes rung out over a churchyard of great men’s graves.
Of the many younger composers who in the 1950s also drew on Webern’s technical discoveries, Niccolò Castiglioni was perhaps the closest to Webern’s own emotional world. Intensely aware of the expressive potential of silence in Webern’s music, he also shared the elder composer’s deep love of the mountains. Tropi (composed, like Epitaphium, in 1959) begins like a manically exaggerated version of the Webern concerto: short bursts of three or four notes passed between instruments and punctuated by silences; a small group of strings and winds sometimes joined and sometimes opposed by the piano; everything taking place in an ultra-high register of clean, clear mountain air – definition at altitude. The volatility of instrumental behaviour in this mountain climate gradually finds a counterweight in slower, more lyrical passages, until at the centre of the piece all five instruments suddenly land on a single pitch in middle register, sustained for over a minute and coloured by a variety of whisperings and rattlings as pitch gradually cedes importance to timbre (a percussionist also now joining the ensemble). The music emerges from this still centre into altered terrain. The hushed middle D gives way to a piercing high E flat. Pitch variety is restored in a passage of chords and gentle sighs. Eventually the fast tempo of the opening is recovered, but not its forceful dynamic levels or its sustained momentum, and a solo piccolo trails off into the clear air.
[also see note here on Webern, Concerto for Nine Instruments]
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