s t a r g a z e | Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews +

Renegade New Classical
Nik Colk Void, Daniel Brandt
s t a r g a z e
Spitalfields Music Festival 2017
St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch
6 December 2017

Once upon a time, pop music was divided into just two genres – Beatles or Rolling Stones, with a possible sub-set of John or Paul. Things are more complicated nowadays. Every single piece within the broad contemporary music scene has its own distinctive moniker. For this concert, we were told that we would see “the realms of classical collide with minimal techno, experimental and electronic music. Electronic it certainly was, as the rustle of the players sorting their music out was picked up by their microphones, followed by an enormous amplified explosion from the banks of speakers. I was relieved there wasn’t any lightning forecast. Continue reading →

House of Monteverdi
Spitalfields Music Festival 2017
St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch
2 December 2017

Things have changed at Spitalfields Music, as the opening night of their annual Winter Festival demonstrated. They have traditionally concentrated on early and contemporary music and, to a certain extent, continue that focus, although the target audience now seems very different from previous years. For the first of their new-style Winter festivals, they have bought in an Artistic Curator, André de Ridder, a conductor who crosses musical borders, not least in his involvement with electronic and pop music. His concept was for a festival made up of a series of ‘mini-festivals’, combining different genres and musicians. The focus is on much younger composers and performers that hitherto. The opening mini-festival, House of Monteverdi, was a 4½ hour marathon featuring four featured young composers, together with the four members of the Hermes Experiment, who jointly composed one of their pieces. The four world premieres and two UK premieres were contrasted and alternated with (and were sometimes influenced by), extracts from Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals – the Songs of Love and War. Continue reading →