| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 6-Jun-2013 Wales Millennium Centre | A miraculous Wagner Dream from Welsh National Opera |
 Credit David Massey.jpg) Miraculous as Jonathan Harvey’s music is, it seems reductive to call Wagner Dream an opera. Half the cast, after all, don’t even sing, but act: it’s a sincere meeting of music and theatre in a way that opera usually isn’t. Add to this director Pierre Audi’s sensitive but conceptually bold production, and the essential impression is of a dramatic multimedia artwork, which happens to crucially involve music – something of a Gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps.
Read full review... | |
| 13-Feb-2013 St Paul's Church | Contemporary Music Venture at St Paul's Church, Bristol |
 There was no doubt that for this concert, one had to enter the front door with a completely open mind. The aim of the Contemporary Music Venture is to promote contemporary music to a wider audience, in an hour and for free – an honourable challenge.
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| 11-Jan-2013 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | Paul Norman and the Ligeti Quartet celebrate the late Jonathan Harvey |
 The late composer Jonathan Harvey, who died last month at age 73, described his Speakings (2008) as the most complicated and ambitious work he had ever written. A 25-minute composition for orchestra and electronics, the piece certainly warrants that description on the levels of scale and logistics alone.Read full review... | |
| 14-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 44: A pocket history of post-war music with the London Sinfonietta |
 To judge by the continued chatter, no-one noticed 100 metronomes on stage being set in motion, signalling the beginning of György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962). Even when the lights were dimmed it only dawned on people slowly that the concert had actually already begun. And yet once the realisation hit home, the entire audience was drawn into the piece, the suspense palpable as one by one the metronomes, each set at a pre-fixed speed, dropped out, eventually leaving only three... then two... then one.Read full review... | |
