Luke Nickel uses Soundbrenner’s haptic metronomes alongside dreamlike roller-coaster visuals, an accelerometer, electronics and strobe lights in a play of vertiginous tempi across limbs.

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Nielsen composed his Wind Quintet in 1922 for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, whose Mozart playing had inspired him. As well as this work, Nielsen planned to write concertos for each of the members of the group but only completed those for flute and clarinet. He wrote it during a three-month stay in Gothenburg, immediately after completing the Fifth Symphony. In a letter to a friend he wrote that ‘the externals are very modest, but the technicalities are for that reason all the more difficult’, and he told he wife that it he was ‘greatly amused’ by the challenge. In his is own programme note on the work, Nielsen wrote:

‘The quintet for winds is one of the composer’s latest works, in which he has attempted to render the characters of the various instruments. At one moment they are all talking at once, at another they are quite alone. The work consists of three movements: a) Allegro, b) Minuet and c) Prelude – Theme with Variations. The theme for these variations is the melody for one of Nielsen’s spiritual songs, which has here been made the basis of a set of variations, now merry and quirky, now elegiac and serious, ending with the theme in all its simplicity and very quietly expressed.’

Nigel Simeone

A musical conversation where each instrument has its own personality! Sometimes they agree, sometimes they argue—but it’s always fun. This section is a type of composition called a ‘theme and variations’ in which the Danish composer Carl Nielsen took a beautiful hymn tune he knew from church and used his imagination to change it a bit more each time we hear it, making something new out of something he found. It’s like musical recycling!

The Song of the Birds, played by Pablo Casals (1876-1973) in 1971, was based on a haunting and melancholy folk tune of his native Catalonia. Casals had experienced the horrors of both world wars, and this piece embodied the cello virtuoso’s prayers for peace. When performing it before the United Nations General Assembly toward the end of his life, he stood up and said, “Birds in Catalonia go singing: Peace, peace, peace.” I remember watching a video recording of this scene.

It might be more appropriate to call the piece this time a fantasia based on The Song of the Birds, rather than its arrangement. I wrote it freely, trying to capture the feelings and emotions of Casals, while imagining its performance by Japanese viola player Nobuko Imai. The original piece was written in A minor, but I chose C minor as its principal key to make the most of the viola’s open strings. Casals was one of the most important artists to Mr. Haruhiko Hagimoto; because I have dedicated this short piece to Mr. Hagimoto, and H.H. are his initials, the piece ends with a prolonged H note.

Akira Nishimura 

The nostalgic-utopian distance 

is friend to me and despairing  

in continuous restlessness 

Luigi Nono was a lifelong Marxist. Brought up in Mussolini’s Italy, he joined the Italian Communist Party in 1952, and early works—Il canto sospeso, Intolleranza 1960, La fabbrica illuminata—demonstrated Nono’s desire to create socially engaged art. He ploughed an individual furrow which few followed (though, in Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado, he had some high-profile supporters): an enthusiastic proponent of serial techniques, Nono was also driven by the belief that all artistic creation should be motivated by egalitarian principles. He was a keen proponent of using the most up-to-date technologies available to him, under the belief that this was the only way to best speak to the current moment. 

La lontananza is crammed full of ideas, both musical and philosophical. Subtitled “madrigal for many wanderers with Gidon Kremer,” the “wanderers” idea refers to a section of a poem by Antonio Machado that Nono discovered on a wall of a cloister in Toledo—“Wanderer, there are no ways, only the wandering”—that Nono reflected on in other late works. (La lontananza was one of the last works he wrote before he died.) The “wanderer” also refers to the mechanics of La lontananza’s realisation. Sheet music is divided across multiple music stands, and the performer travels through the space. (The first performer, Gidon Kremer, is imbued directly into the work, with recordings of his speech and other off-cuts from Nono and Kremer’s recording sessions making it into the final tape recording. Performers today wander with Nono and Kremer together.) 

The title, meanwhile, references a complicated bit of Marxist thought. Its dedicatee, the composer Salvatore Sciarrino, explained it as follows: “the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica), the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible (futura) through the medium of distance (lontananza).” It seems that Nono, through this piece, is prefiguring ideas of hauntology popularised by Jacques Derrida, and later Mark Fisher. But for contemporary audiences, where future nostalgia is an ever-present part of pop culture, and where the radical, futuristic dreams of previous generations fade further into the distance with each passing day, perhaps this idea isn’t as complicated as first thought. 

The piece lasts for a maximum of sixty minutes. The solo violinist is accompanied by eight channels of tape, controlled by a sound technician who must be as attentive as the soloist. And, across the eight tapes, it’s not just other violin sounds that are heard, but everyday ephemera recorded during the process too (doors, voices, words, chairs). La lontananza is a haunted essay on time—looking forward, falling back, remembering, dreaming, and remembering how to dream. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

Sometimes, like a thrilling story or film, what makes music exciting, also makes it strange and scary… This piece is like being inside a spinning top! Full of fast, twirling sounds, it’s magical whirlwind of strange, darkness. Like a real-life tornado is starts slowly, becomes furiously fast, and collapses back into silence. Per Nørgård is a Danish musical explorer, who loves creating music that feel like galaxies, storms, or even buzzing insects. This piece, he has described as “a water-world of ripples and bubbles”. Can you hear what he means?