Much music, but how much merit?

Meanwhile merit is guaranteed at the Wigmore Hall when a three concert series combining the music of György Kurtág with Bach’s Art of Fugue starts on September 20. The artist line-up is pretty starry, with Thomas Adès, the Keller Quartet, and soprano Valdine Anderson. But it is eclipsed by the appearance of Kurtag himself playing his piano duet Játékok on November 8, and for me these three concerts are among of the musical highspots of the London autumn.
Meanwhile the obsession with anniversaries continues well past the BBC Proms with a Steve Reich fest running at the Barbican from September 28 to October 8. Reich himself (below) premieres a new piece, the Daniel Variations, with the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the

Finally, just to confirm that you can have too much of a good thing, the Barbican's obsession with contemporary American music at the expense of pretty well everything else continues in November with an American Pioneers series featuring, among others, John Adams as conductor and composer. Adams seems to be a permanent fixture on the podium in London at the moment - perhaps someone in New York would like to organise a British Pioneers series featuring Arnold and Rubbra?
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to The latest avant-garde tricks ...
Comments
Follow this link for full details of the Arnold Festival.
Last week I was excited when a friend promised to slip me a review copy of a new Philip Glass recording -- whose name he couldn't remember. I was disappointed when I was slipped, instead of 'Planet 8', the new recording of the Linz Austria production, led by Dennis Russell Davies, of Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang's 'The Voyage', which I had listened to twice on radio, and which -- I see -- was the second world premiere given by the Metropolitan Opera House, the world's largest and most prestigious, in 26 or so years (the first was the Corigliano/Hoffman 'The Ghosts of Versailles', the previous year).
http://www.orangemountainmusic.com/voyage.html
Next month I'll have an opportunity in Washington (some years after London, but before Berlin and Vienna) to see how British composer Nicholas Maw treated William Styron's 'Sophie's Choice'. (Like TS Eliot before him when approached by Michael Tippett with the idea for 'Midsummer's Marriage', Styron apparently told Mr Maw to write his own opera libretto.)
The Cave? No, probably not. Tehillim or The Desert Music (just for starters)? Hell yes.