Freddie Mercury – profile (BBC Proms)

Freddie Mercury – profile (BBC Proms)

The musical achievements of Freddie Mercury – one of the best-known and biggest-selling bands that this country has produced – are inextricably linked to those of Queen. It was as Queen’s frontman that Mercury wrote and performed his greatest compositions, at the same time honing an infectious, outrageous stage persona that reached its pinnacle in the mid-1980s – most famously at Wembley Stadium’s 1985 Live Aid concert, which was broadcast globally to an estimated 1.5 billion people across 150 countries.

Shostakovich: A Guide to the Symphonies (LSO)

Shostakovich: A Guide to the Symphonies (LSO)

It is hard not to map biographical meaning onto Shostakovich’s music. His extraordinary life invites it. As do his own (often conflicting) comments. The symphonies in particular offer us a tantalising glimpse into his psyche – his complex relationship with the Soviet regime, his life as a member of a very precarious elite. Wavering between wild energy, wry humor and haunting desolation, they are a rich source of inference and contradiction. But, more than any of that, they demonstrate his utter devotion to music. He simply had to compose, even when the world around him was falling to pieces.

Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 4, ‘The Jungle’ – programme note (LSO)

Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 4, ‘The Jungle’ – programme note (LSO)

New York City: ‘the most fluid, pressure-packed and cosmopolitan metropolis the modern world has ever seen’, according to Wynton Marsalis. And he should know, having lived there on and off since 1979, when he arrived from New Orleans to study at the Juilliard School. Tapping into this near-40-year relationship, in 2016 the New York Philharmonic commissioned Marsalis to write a work on ‘New York-inspired themes’ for its 175th-anniversary season. The result, a sprawling, 65-minute symphony subtitled ‘The Jungle’, pays loving homage to the city, capturing its melting-pot culture and frenetic energy across six movements.

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Boulez: Chamber Music – various programme notes (LSO)

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Boulez: Chamber Music – various programme notes (LSO)

For much of his life Pierre Boulez was preoccupied by the idea of a work being continually ‘in progress’. So many of his compositions exist in multiple versions that those which don’t – his early masterpiece Le marteau sans maître (1953–5), for example – are the exceptions that prove the rule. And while Messagesquisse (1976), which opens tonight’s concert, is one of those exceptions, it also represents the first link in a chain of pieces that stretches over several decades.

Mark-Anthony Turnage: Sco – programme note (LSO)

Mark-Anthony Turnage: Sco – programme note (LSO)

Sitting at the heart of tonight’s world premiere are two figures of huge importance to Mark-Anthony Turnage. The first, Sir Simon Rattle, for whose 70th birthday Sco was commissioned, is one of the composer’s longest-standing champions. The second is tonight’s soloist, the man who gives Sco its name, John Scofield …

Helmut Lachenmann: My Melodies – programme note and profile (LSO)

Helmut Lachenmann: My Melodies – programme note and profile (LSO)

‘Everyone will be waiting for a melody, and I will of course disappoint them all!’, Helmut Lachenmann said with a grin at the 2018 premiere of My Melodies. Indeed, this mammoth piece contains scant melody in the traditional sense. Pithy cells – scraps of fragments of melody – pepper the orchestral texture, cavorting and twisting in a multi layered dialogue. Stray patterns bump up alongside toneless whispers and scrapes. But a full-blooded, tubthumping tune? No chance.

Anna Clyne: This Midnight Hour – programme note and profile (LSO)

Anna Clyne: This Midnight Hour – programme note and profile (LSO)

As with so many of Anna Clyne’s orchestral works, This Midnight Hour takes inspiration from nonmusical sources, in this case two poems. The first is Charles Baudelaire’s much-anthologised ‘Harmonie du soir’ (Evening Harmony) from the 1857 collection Les fleurs du mal. Stuffed with sensory observations and evocative similes – floral scent, tortured violins, a drowning, blood-clotted sun – the poem comprises a series of woozy repetitions that fold in on themselves like a hall of mirrors …

Ondřej Adámek: Follow Me – programme note and profile (LSO)

Ondřej Adámek: Follow Me – programme note and profile (LSO)

The ‘narrative concerto’ has its roots in the early 19th century. Think Harold in Italy, Hector Berlioz’s ‘symphony with viola obbligato’, or Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück for piano and orchestra, both of which cast the soloist as protagonist in a musical drama. In Follow Me, Ondřej Adámek takes this idea and adds a macabre twist …

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Eric Whitacre: Eternity in an Hour – programme note (BBC Proms)

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Eric Whitacre: Eternity in an Hour – programme note (BBC Proms)

Artist, mystic and political radical William Blake is today considered one of the major cultural figures of the Romantic Age. And, although he was virtually unknown as a poet during his lifetime, Auguries of Innocence has become one of his best-loved works. Rich with symbolist imagery and social criticism, the poem meditates on the interconnectedness of all living things, the inherent goodness in nature and the fragility of human innocence …

Wynton Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto – programme note and profile (LSO)

Wynton Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto – programme note and profile (LSO)

Wynton Marsalis made his name as a classical trumpet virtuoso with a recording of the Joseph Haydn, Johann Hummel and Leopold Mozart trumpet concertos. That disc won a Grammy in 1984, along with another of Marsalis’ albums, the jazz smash Think of One …

Donghoon Shin: Nachtergebung – programme note and profile (LSO)

Donghoon Shin: Nachtergebung – programme note and profile (LSO)

The poems of Georg Trakl have proved rich source material for composers: Anton Webern, Paul Hindemith, Peter Maxwell Davies and Thea Musgrave have all been drawn to the Austrian expressionist’s rich, macabre imagery. Donghoon Shin, who often looks to literature for inspiration, is the latest …

Live and Let Die — Paul McCartney’s song helped take Bond into a new era (Financial Times)

Live and Let Die — Paul McCartney’s song helped take Bond into a new era (Financial Times)

What makes a classic James Bond song? A sense of the epic, surely. Flaring brass, rippling strings. A melody-driven framework, an irresistible hook. Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die”, written for the eighth instalment of the film franchise, certainly ticks the right boxes …

Abel Selaocoe: Four Spirits – Programme note and profile (LSO)

Abel Selaocoe: Four Spirits – Programme note and profile (LSO)

For Abel Selaocoe, tradition is something to be both revered and dismantled. His Four Spirits is, on the face of it, a concerto for cello, voice and percussion. There are soloists and an orchestra. There are four movements. But that is where any resemblance to the ‘Classical’ concerto ends …

Fazil Say: Violin Concerto – Programme Note and Profile (LSO)

Fazil Say: Violin Concerto – Programme Note and Profile (LSO)

Fazıl Say and Patricia Kopatchinskaja began performing together as an electrifying violinpiano duo in 2004. Four years later they released a CD of works by Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Fazıl Say himself, exhibiting a kindred radicalism …