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If this is a representative cross-section of unaccompanied American choral music since the Second World War, it shows a genre in which beauty of sound and an atmosphere of prayerfulness are the chief characteristics. With the exception of London-born Healy Willan, whose music here often sounds like animated Herbert Howells, these composers concentrate on little else, although few do it with such...
It is often said of Nicholas Maw, who died in 2009, that he was born at the wrong time. The lyrical, predominantly tonal idiom he cultivated from the 1960s onwards – so strikingly at odds with musical styles favoured by his more celebrated contemporaries – suggested his heart was beating with the compositional currents of the early 20th century. Certainly, this was how Maw himself understood it....
****
A rhapsodic critic once said: “For generations people will be buying tickets to hear his music”. It’s a cheering prophecy, though to judge by the half-empty auditorium on Sunday night, when one work by Nicholas Maw followed another, complete fulfilment seems a distance away. Yet listening to a basketful of the late English composer’s compositions, you can certainly understand some reasons...
The British composer Nicholas Maw (1935 – 2009) received mixed reception during his life; dubbed a ‘neo-romantic’ his music was in stark contrast with the European avant-garde. The Telegraph obituary from May 2009 wrote that “at a time when Boulez and Stockhausen were in the ascendant, and the sort of big Romantic pieces Maw was writing were deeply unfashionable, he refused to change or abandon...
Many years ago, in what might be seen as an extreme form of “authenticity”, I sang in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem that purported to include only the music that Mozart himself wrote. It was a strange evening, and obviously a rather shorter one than we are accustomed to, ending as it did in mid-air on a dominant chord eight bars into the Lacrimosa.
A true Mozart-only performance would...
Founded by the late Richard Hickox, the City of London Sinfonia reaches its 40th anniversary this year. One of the celebratory projects initiated by Hickox, who died suddenly in 2008, was a new work by Colin Matthews. In the event, it fell to Stephen Layton – his successor as the orchestra's artistic director – to realise the piece at this Prom.
No Man's Land is a memorial to the losses of the...