When György Ligeti was a child he had a recurring dream. In it, a vast network of tangled fibres hung around his bed; even the smallest movement would cause the whole structure to shudder and pulsate. Related many years later, this core memory has become a popular analogy for what the composer called ‘micropolyphony’ – music made up of many individual lines, each moving at different speeds and by varying degrees, combining to create a shimmering cluster of sound …
Both Mozart and Schubert were fond of four-hands piano music. As children, Mozart and his sister Nannerl would perform duets on their tours of aristocratic Europe, while Schubert’s first surviving work – written when he was 13 – is a four-hands Fantasy. Later in life each would contribute handsomely to the genre, composing works that far outshone the domestic role it had traditionally occupied …
Stravinsky was one of the 20th century’s great tastemakers. His new works generallycame as a surprise – and few more so than The Fairy’s Kiss, a ballet based on music by Tchaikovsky. The Romantic master was, at the time, firmly old hat. He seemed to embody all that Modernist Stravinsky eschewed: decadence, lyricism, sentimentality. And yet, when the work was unveiled at the Paris Opéra – performed by former Ballet Russes dancer Ida Rubinstein’s new company – it eluded these criticisms. Stravinsky, it seems, had taken the old hat and made it vintage …
Vont-tér is one of several recent pieces by Márton Ellés to spotlight a string instrument. At its core is the idea of taking the physicality of string playing to its extreme – exploring, across 15 minutes of splintered, explosive gestures, the instrument’s infinite timbral possibilities, while also avoiding what Ellés calls the ‘sweetly saturated and often overused string sound’ …
Composers have been revisiting their own material since time immemorial. For some (Handel, J. S. Bach) this was for practical reasons. For others (Brahms, Bruckner) revisions were borne of a relentless perfectionism. For Thomas Adès it was both nostalgia and curiosity that brought him back to The Origin of the Harp: ‘I wanted for some time to make a new orchestration of it for a more traditional orchestra, as the original ensemble [three clarinets, three violas, three cellos and percussion] is quite tricky to assemble, and also I was very interested to discover how to translate the music acoustically to a traditional orchestral structure.’
For Thomas Adès, an aquifer is analogous to the way a composer steers a musical impulse. The strength and direction of groundwater, flowing beneath us, is dictated by geology – layers of rock with varying degrees of permeability. So must musical material be channelled through a series of compositional tools: structure, harmony, orchestration and so on. It is from this process that Aquifer gets its title – representing a kind of inverse programme, in which the music informs the subject. Here, Adès enlists the full gamut of his considerable compositional technique to steer, contain and ultimately unleash a musical wave.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
‘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.
