600th Edition

A Happy New Year to my website readers, and my thanks as ever for your visit here. Appropriately (and amazingly to me) this happens to be the 600th post I've put up on my site since it was set up in 2014. I'm posting somewhat less frequently these days, but I'll continue to signpost interesting events coming up, and report on unusual visits here and there.

In the next few months, the orchestral headline in my diary (March 13th, Barbican) is a performance of The Welcome Arrival of Rain, a big piece first performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vanska in 2003. It's been a while since I've heard it; I'm so happy that the BBC Symphony and Sakari Oramo are going to take it up again.  It'll be followed a month later (April 14th) by the premiere of the complete Mass Service I've written for the children's choir of Notre-Dame (La Maitrise Notre-Dame de Paris) in the famously refurbished Cathedral. An event of great mystery, at the time of writing.

At home, I'll have my "work cut out for me" writing two new, large-scale pieces, for the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra; and for RIAS Kammerchor Berlin/Ensemble Resonanz. Both will be heard for the first time in 2027. (From my composing perspective, it feels like New Year's Day 2027 will be with us any minute now...)

Optimistic Poster, pictured in Bussum, Netherlands.