Conductor Maxime Pascal delights in the vast, the weird, and the borderline unachievable. At the Salzburg Festival this year, he offered a program featuring two of Pierre Boulez’s most forbidding works—”Sur Incises” and “…explosante-fixe…”—each lasting around 40 minutes and featuring ensemble writing of dazzling complexity. Just programming one is a feat; Pascal did both, with […]
Author Archives: Benjamin Poore
Posted inHistory
A Piece for Peace
In 1965, the United Nations asked Benjamin Britten to compose a choral work to celebrate the organization’s 20th anniversary. The piece, it hoped, would be “the natural and inevitable sequel to the War Requiem.” The Secretary-General, U Thant, explained that the new work would be premiered at the UN Day concert on October 24, 1965, […]
Posted inEssay
They Toll For Thee
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Clear White Light
In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work. “The Protecting Veil” collects a set of […]
Posted inEssay
God’s Time
On a frozen evening in Silesia in January 1941, a young French composer, along with three other prisoners of war, performed an hour-long, eight-movement work for piano, cello, violin and clarinet to a rapt audience. “From the moment I read the back-of-an-album summary…the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music,” Michael Symmons Roberts […]
Posted inEssay
The Book of Hours
Twentieth-century physics expanded our sense of subatomic and cosmological scales, opening up musical time and space in the process. Modernism is full of the complex dance between “large” and “small.” It includes the encyclopedic gigantism of works like Mahler’s Symphony No.8, Havergal Brian’s “Gothic” Symphony, or Alexander Scriabin’s “Mysterium.” The latter, an unperformed and unperformable […]
Posted inEssay
Rough, Tender, Yielding
In England, the summer country house opera season is winding up. Dinner jackets fly south to the dry cleaner; wicker picnic hampers bed down to hibernate until the spring. Although there are summer opera festivals all over the world, the country house phenomenon is almost unique to the British: few other countries give such primacy […]
Posted inInterview
The Reverse Conductor
In 2022, I sang Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Albert Hall. During the performance a spotlit figure caught my eye, moving his hands dynamically and expressively with the musical flow, but who was neither a conductor, nor a singer, nor an instrumentalist. That figure was Paul Whittaker: a Deaf musician who uses British […]
Posted inReport
Inhabiting the Curve
Cate Blanchett isn’t the only conductor in Todd Field’s “Tár” (2022). There is her predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic, Andris, and the Gilbert Kaplan cipher Eliot (Mark Strong). There are also two assistant conductors: the aspirant Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant), who hopes to take the assistant position at the Berlin Phil, and the hapless Sebastian […]
Posted inPlaylist
The Best Opening Chords in Classical Music
Some pieces of music burst into life with feats of virtuosic daring; others rumble up from the bowels of the earth; some loom over you hieratically. Many beginnings are defined by some brilliant melodic gesture: Strauss’s “Don Juan,” for instance, scales the orchestra with a kind of priapic triumph. As a miserable year comes to […]