Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 September

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

We're still buzzing from last night's performance! Thank you to everyone that tuned in!

If you missed it you can still watch it on @BBCiPlayer 👉https://t.co/S4RseaVyb7

Set your alarms for a special archive broadcast of our 2000 Prom with Jessye Norman at 7pm on Sunday! ⏰

— London Sinfonietta (@Ldn_Sinfonietta) September 2, 2020

Prom programme-notes* are here ! :https://t.co/hijs3dErC3

I'd rather have heard a segue from the texturally engaging featured reed-sounds of the Philip Glass to Julia Wolfe's high-energy toccata crescendo, but @Ldn_Sinfonietta players need peer-applause !

* Track-listing...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

Harder, perhaps, than the preceding works, because both neon (by @tansydavies) and Edmund Finnis' in situ (to follow) are relatively looser than those more explicit pulsations, they are harder to assimilate at first blush, and so will blossom more clearly with further hearings...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

With this CD (somewhere !) chez Apsley, it will be interesting to compare the live version with that known from the recording ! pic.twitter.com/Jzd6YBdU5G

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

Not bravura per se, but an able and welcome demonstration of how it need not be electric guitar*** whose sound-production is bent and moulded in the actual playing.

*** Which we also associate with Reich, because, for example, of Electric Counterpoint or Electric Guitar Phase.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

A resonance of two occupied places in one that once were, and then those fell who could not get away when both fell, and those who saw and mourned and witnessed those who had fallen (some here, in the work, via tape) - resonating with this place, emptied by death, filled by music

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 1, 2020

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

What is this fascination with the music of Adès? (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 March

Well, I have now witnessed the much-vaunted Thomas Adès (I was sceptical, but The Tempest - almost like The Artist (2011) - seemed to have everyone enthralled, i.e. in slavery), and he does not, at any rate, look like a man who is comfortable with himself: it could be fanciful, but he struck me, in dress and demeanour, as more like a harassed postmaster (or, maybe, an astonished station-master) than the director of an evening's programme of music.

In fact, he did not direct at all: he conducted, arms jutting out to give cues and the like, and he even conducted a very small chamber group, of no more than half-a-dozen players, almost as if, with a string quartet performing one of his works, he would do the same.

As to his music, it may not be pastiche as such, but these were my brief impressions of his concerto Concentric Paths (which, I also believe, was meant to sound more clever than it was - some people want to claim about Chopin that his solo piano works sound very difficult, but are not really that hard to play):

If I had not known that I was listening to the first movement of this concerto for violin, I would have sworn that this was a piece of Ligeti, and that made me feel that Adès does not have his own voice.

(Sally Beamish has just been on Composer of the Week, and, Undertow, a piece by Tansy Davies was played to-night on Radio 3, and neither of those composers sounded so like anyone else.)

In the second movement, it appeared to be a variety of composers' influences (two British) that I was hearing: in writing this, I did forget, for a moment, who all three were, but it was Shostakovich, Maxwell Davies, and Nyman.

In the case of Nyman alone, he continued into the finale: unlike with what sounded like a piece of Ligeti, the music just seemed immensely in the shadow of Nymanesque concerns and approaches (and maybe, as Adès looked, not happy with them).


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