London Sinfonietta
Tully Scope, a New Festival at Lincoln Center: Preview and Concert Schedule
An exciting new festival at Lincoln Center will make an already busy period — February 22 to March 18 — even busier. It bears the slightly odd (and slightly clumsy, I think) name, Tully Scope Festival. But no matter, the …
London Sinfonietta: Xenakis – Architect of Sound, London Sinfonietta and André de Ridder at the Southbank Centre’s Ether Festival
The Southbank's annual Ether Festival, exploring innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches to contemporary music, includes this year a Xenakis weekend (perhaps timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the composer's death), of which this concert is a part; following the Barbican's "Total Immersion" day dedicated to him two years ago, there seems to be a bit of a vogue for Xenakis in London at the moment. I'm no aficionado, but have always been intrigued by his unique background as an architect and mathematician who applied the same structural principles to composition, and grateful that the resulting music doesn't sound remotely as sterile as one might imagine — in fact far less so, to my mind, than what one might call the pseudo-mathematical approach of total serialism.