| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 22-May-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Mozart, Lachenmann and postmodern Beethoven from Ensemble Resonanz |
 1.jpg) The Ensemble Resonanz is a Hamburg-based contemporary chamber orchestra committed to finding bridges to modernism amid works from centuries past, and to that end this concert featured Helmut Lachenmann set alongside Mozart, and Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles rescored by Manuel Hidalgo. At times these seemed liked interesting propositions, but in forcing resemblances into resonances and not allowing for similarities and contrasts to arise dialectically this exercise inhibited the connections it was intended to make.
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| 24-Apr-2012 Royal College of Music: Inner Parry Room | ExplorEnsemble at the Royal College of Music |
 rehearse Charlie Sdrauligs hush.jpg) Contemporary music ensembles can be rather nebulous entities, their repertoire often necessitating complete line-up changes between pieces and the "whole" of the ensemble rarely being needed at the same time. The aim should be a sort of family resemblance between pieces and performance styles, rather than the organicism often desired in more traditional recitals – but contemporary recitals can still be exciting and coherent wholes, as Tuesday night's debut from ExplorEnsemble proved.
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| 23-Apr-2012 Kings Place: Hall Two | Aisha Orazbayeva at Kings Place |
 Aisha Orazbayeva rests her violin under her chin as the welcoming applause subsides. She raises her bow and nonchalantly touches the screw at its tip against one of the strings, making an extremely quiet 'ting'. I, probably along with a good percentage of the Kings Place audience, am unsure as to whether or not the concert has started.
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| 3-Jun-2011 Kings Place: Hall One | Written Unwritten | London Sinfonietta with Matthew Bourne |
 Maverick improviser Matthew Bourne and London Sinfonietta’s reliable principal players created an extraordinary concert in this second of the Sinfonietta’s Written/UnWritten series. Despite the harmonics and echoes behind a diverse collection of twentieth-century pieces and irreverent improvisations, few risks were taken by anyone other than Bourne, but the result was an impressive and often hypnotic series of the most carefully crafted contemporary classical music of the last fifty years.
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