| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 22-Apr-2012 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | The Arditti Quartet play Nancarrow and Ligeti |
 Conlon Nancarrow may be most famous for his player piano studies, all of which were performed at the Southbank Centre last weekend, but his instrumental music is worth a listen too. His Third String Quartet is perhaps his most important effort for 'actual' performers rather than machines, but on Sunday night the Arditti Quartet also made a decent case for the First Quartet. And they threw in a magnificent Ligeti performance for good measure as well.
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| 21-Apr-2012 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | London Sinfonietta Perform Conlon Nancarrow |
 Having missed a chance to hear Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Study no. 21 (Canon X) due to a spontaneous programme switch earlier in the day, I was delighted that Dominic Murcott’s arrangement of the piece for London Sinfonietta and player piano opened this concert. The piece is predicated simply on an upper voice beginning very fast and slowing down, and a lower voice beginning slowly and speeding up so much that the final 12 seconds of music contain no fewer than 1,028 notes.Read full review... | |
| 21-Apr-2012 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | Impossible Brilliance: An Ambitious Celebration of Conlon Nancarrow |
 This weekend saw the Southbank Centre embark on an ambitious festival programme of rarely performed composer Conlon Nancarrow. One of the main reasons Nancarrow’s music is rarely performed is that the vast majority of what he wrote was for the archaic player piano. Even a Nancarrow devotee (like myself) must admit that his biography and approach to music is nothing short of eccentric – a communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, he found it difficult to adapt to the developing anti-communist movement in America so he adopted Mexico as his home from 1940.
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| 4-Mar-2012 Le Poisson Rouge | Musical Modernism with Ursula Oppens and the JACK Quartet |
 Good news for skeptics: modernist music can be beautiful. If what keeps listeners away from the “difficult” music written in the past century is a fear of dissonance, they can rest assured. If such American mavericks as Conlon Nancarrow and Charles Wuorinen can produce so many moments of beauty, stillness, and humor, and if virtuosos like Ursula Oppens and the JACK Quartet can realize those moments as brilliantly as they did last Sunday, surely audiences will come around.
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