The slice of the Proms which I’m getting this summer seems less of full of twentieth and twenty-first century music than usual. Works of Gunther Schuller, Simon Holt, Harrison Birtwistle, Stockhausen, Colin Matthews, Luke Bedford, Brett Dean, Oliver Knussen, (late) Stravinsky, George Benjamin, Stephen Montague, Takamitsu, and Julian Anderson were done before I got here and music by Judith Weir, Bayan Northcott, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, James MacMillan, Tansy Davies, and Jonathan Dove will be on after I leave. But there’s still plenty happening while I’m around.
On Friday night, August 13, the BBC Philharmonic and Gianandrea Noseda, on a program with otherwise pretty standard pieces (Verdi Forza de Destino overture, Bruch Concerto , Schumann Fourth Symphony ), performed Partita by Dallapiccola. Written in 1930 to 1933, before Dallapiccola started writing 12-tone music, it is larger, both in terms of it’s length (twenty seven minutes) and it’s orchestration (tr...
↧