Adès makes you hear things with which you thought you were familiar as if they were completely newI believe new music should take you to new places, via soundscapes and landscapes of feeling you hadn't thought could ...
His enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds make Rihm a true original, and worth getting to knowTradition, Mahler once famously said, is "Schlamperei" - which means something akin to sloppiness. Mahler ...
At 16 hours of music across four operas, Wagner's Ring Cycle requires serious stamina. So here are some reduced versions of the epic, including one that comes in at a single secondWagner's Ring. The biggest musical ...
This week, Tom Service looks at a composer whose mind is always on higher mattersIt's not every composer whose music is guaranteed to uplift and revivify you, which makes you feel a sense of essential ...
If the Mercury 2012 judges want to reward fresh and dynamic new music, why has classical music disappeared from the list?There's no classical on the Mercury shortlist this year; just another season in which the tumbleweeds ...
His compositions are the ultimate in complexity. So how to approach the works of this philosophically demanding musician?Here's a question. What is complexity in music? Is there any music more complex than, say, the ...
Some 6,000 people fill London's Albert Hall for each of the Proms. But where does that audience go for the rest of the year?It's one of the greatest and most mysterious seasonal migration patterns you can hope to witness, ...
His operas tackle politics, terrorism and terror itself. One of our most important contemporary voices, his music is both more radical and more conservative than his minimalist forebearsHere's what I love most about John ...
The LPO's concert on Saturday, which we're streaming live, promises to return to one of music's perennial questions: how does music represent the world?The London Philharmonic's concert on Saturday, which we're streaming ...
A composer who refused to play by the rules – and whose work has infiltrated popular consciousness – Ligeti's music is both richer and darker than what Stanley Kubrick heard in itIt's where we're all headed, of ...
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