I enjoyed so many great releases during the last year that merely the act of looking back, replaying some key choices, has taken quite some (pleasurable) time. I hope the 25 I eventually settled on include some new discoveries for you, and that you enjoy them as much as I have. The main list is…
Category: Music
Kensington Igor: Prom 8, Pergolesi ‘Stabat mater’ & Stravinsky ‘Pulcinella’
It’s a phrase we’ll hopefully hear a lot more of in the coming weeks and months: “it’s good to be back”. Cliché, perhaps: but the thought filled me like a billowing sail when the Royal Albert Hall loomed into view for my first live Prom of the season. There isn’t another classical music experience quite…
Stealing & Re-imagining: ‘Landscapes’ by Doug Thomas
Most composers (and artists and writers too) steal from others. They learn their craft by copying; studying the works of others who’ve gone before them offers important insights into the nuts and bolts of the music (structure, harmony, texture etc) as well as the composer’s personal musical fingerprints.
Rank amateur
I’m writing this piece on the birth date of my favourite composer, Schubert. Here’s to you, Franz. Has Schubert always been my favourite composer? No, not at all. I first got seriously into classical music through choral works, so from the outset Byrd and Pärt were vying for my affections. I found opera through Adams,…
20 from 2020
However badly this year has treated us – and in the UK, it has treated those working in the arts very badly indeed – we have still been lucky enough to hear an astonishing amount of great music. Before joining ArtMuseLondon, I would normally assemble a couple of ‘round-up’ posts for my own blog ‘Specs’…
Past presence: Dead Space Chamber Music and Kate Arnold
Two brilliantly-timed records that for me sum up the word ‘spirit’: both in the eerie, evocative atmospheres they conjure up, and the sheer inventive brio with which the music was created. * Dead Space Chamber Music are an intriguing collective from Bristol, UK, who seemingly belong to all genres or none. Within the first few…
Alleviate – Simon Templeton
I have found myself drawn more and more, as both player and listener, to the kind of post-Classical ambient piano music which Simon Templeton writes, and never more so this year when I have felt a certain estrangement from the kind of classical music I usually enjoy hearing in concert. Ambient is a misnomer, for…
Spired and emotional: the Oxford Lieder Festival 2020
On paper, the Oxford Lieder festival (wholly online this year, for contagious reasons) ended about a month ago. But not for me. Right up to the last minute, I’ve been extracting the maximum value I possibly can from my catch-up pass, viewing as many concerts as possible before the on-demand video archive finally vanishes from…
Mystery lays: Stef Conner, ‘Riddle Songs’
This startling, life-affirming record somehow manages a feat that has otherwise eluded science so far: time travel. Stef Conner has composed a suite of songs that demonstrate how, through the arts, the past is all there, all at once, running parallel to our present. What are its secrets? A bit of background (although Conner’s liner…
Yes, surprises: Rick Simpson, ‘Everything All of the Time: Kid A Revisited’
This album is an extraordinary achievement – certainly no ordinary ‘covers project’. Rick Simpson and his ensemble wilfully tackle head-on perhaps the original writers’ most elusive set of tracks and, fittingly, bring the same sense of adventure to the material as Radiohead might recognise from recording much of their music first time around. It’s impossible…
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