Birmingham is changing by the week. With all the rebuilding going on at present, it’s unrecognisable to a longtime but irregular visitor like myself. My method of navigating via landmarks I could remember from the old days (such as St Martin in the Bullring, pictured) wasn’t much help while I searched for the new Conservatoire building, somewhere amidst a heap of new architecture, and arrived at Young Composers’ Project at lea...

I try never to miss a concert by the National Youth Orchestra. Who else would team up (as on this evening) Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem with Shostakovich’s The Year 1905 (his 11th Symphony, one of the good ones) ? And play them with septuple woodwind, 10 horns, 8 trombones, 3 tubas ?

You have to get used to the balance of course – the orchestra must have thought long and hard about this, with conductor Jaime Martin. As a liste...

In the Netherlands, people celebrate new year by deep frying donuts (pictured) and letting off nuclear-grade fireworks, for at least 72 hours continuously. I found a much more elegant way to celebrate the end of 2019, by attending Dutch National Opera’s Cenerentola/ Cinderella (by Rossini). Or Assepoester in Dutch; confusingly, the character in the opera is named Angelina – her family just call her Cinderella to be extra mean.

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One of the late Stephen Cleobury’s remarkable achievements was to rear a vigorous branch of contemporary composition devoted to Christmas carols. The BBC Singers’ Christmas concert at the Temple Church was a good moment to contemplate this, with a programme of 17 recent seasonal items, including a world premiere by Naji Hakim (present to hear his interesting new version of Veni, Veni Emmanuel, featuring of course his typically...

Vox Luna is a chamber choir directed by Alex Woolf.  He’s a conspicuously successful and versatile young composer who must be so busy, but always appears calm and cheerful – I don’t know how he does it. The choir make a ravishing sound, so it was appropriate to hear them in in the also ravishing surroundings of the Wallace Collection. Having walked to the gallery via Jermyn and Bond Streets, with their luxury shops Christmas l...

Never have I been so glad of long hours in rehearsals. Shut away in Maida Vale Studios (Election Day) and backstage at the Barbican (The Day After) phones were switched off, internet was inaccessible, and music had to take precedence, come what may. The evening after a fraught national all-nighter, we weren’t expecting much of an audience at the BBC Symphony’s concert. But in fact a sizeable bunch of people turned up, several...

Since the coming of Eurostar/Eurotunnel over 25 years ago I have not so much as set foot in the town of Dover. Until this weekend, when a commission from the Yarrow family, written for the choir of St.Mary-the-Virgin in memory of former chorister John Yarrow, allowed me to spend a whole day roaming Dover’s spectacular sights (and not just those ‘iconic’ White Cliffs).

But first there was the rewarding experience of attending an...

Years ago I reviewed Barry Smith’s book Peter Warlock/The Life of Philip Heseltine in the TLS. It is a most useful scholarly  book, but also a page-turner, almost a murder mystery, ending with the composer’s mysterious death at the age of 36. (When writing about him, I never worked out whether to call him ‘Heseltine’, his real name, but now I’ll stick with ‘Warlock’, as black magic was amongst his many interests.)

My brief acqu...

Thanks to the mighty Calne Music and Arts Festival, I have been visiting this Wiltshire town over a period of 42 years, the first visit being in 1977, when I resided here for a short time as Southern Arts’ associate composer. I’m now President of the Festival, which is in very good shape, always resolutely local, but with a remarkable variety of things happening during the Festival period in October.

Another place I’ve often vi...

For The Big Picture, a new work commissioned for the opening of Aberdeen Art Gallery I felt it was pretty much incumbent on me to explore the relationship between colour and sound. I decided to tackle this by wondering whether, as is sometimes suggested, different keys suggest particular colours to the listener. I don’t have perfect pitch, and am certainly not a synaesthete (I’ve noticed moreover that the one or two people I’v...