British chamber music ensemble (1965-1987
Commemorations 2025 (Inception: Fires of London)
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- United Kingdom
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2024-04-25
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2021-10-17 15:04:00
Virtue signalling does not sell concert tickets
[…] illustrate. You have a car to sell; but it has a brake problem. So, of course, you get the brakes fixed. But you don't then advertise it with the headline 'Faulty brakes fixed'. Slipped Disc reader MSC laments today's ordinary and ritualistic concerts. It would be difficult to imagine a concert less ordinary and more mould-breaking than the 1974 BBC Prom when David Munrow, Peter Maxwell Davies, the Early Music Consort, and The Fires of London performed music by Dufay and from The Devils soundtrack. This concert started at 7.30 pm, not at the midnight hour that any vaguely challenging music is consigned to in today's Prom schedules. Did the audience run screaming from the Albert Hall? Did the 1970s equivalent of John Borslap post a rant on the 1970s equivalent of Slipped Disc? No, of course not. So it is very easy to explain where classical music […]
2021-01-19 00:30:00
Maxwell Davies: Symphony No. 1 - Simon Rattle
Peter Maxwell Davies:01. - 04. Symphony No.1 [54'20]05. - 06. Points and Dances from 'Taverner'* [17'44]Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle; The Fires of London conducted by Peter Maxwell Davies* Decca 4788354 [recorded August 1978 & December 1971*; issued 1979 and 1973* on LP, first issued on CD in 2003, this digital edition 2015] [digital download; flacs, booklet and cover scans] Recording venues: Kingsway Hall and St John the Evangelist Islington*, LondonRecording engineers: Stanley Goodall and Tryggvi Tryggvason*; Producers: James Mallinson and Michael Bremner* This was one of Simon Rattle's first major recordings, made after he gave the symphony's first performance at the age of 23, pre-dating the fine Sibelius Fifth Symphony, also with the Philharmonia, and Mahler (Cooke) Tenth Symphony with the Bournemouth Symphony. It was highly celebrated at the time of first issue (when it was just Maxwell Davies' Symphony) and had to wait until 2003 for first […]
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Faces of classical music
2019-07-14 13:25:00
The best new classical albums: July 2019
[…] Erika Fox's language is bold, feisty, uncompromising and astonishingly fresh. A highly distinctive style has emerged from a childhood suffused with music of Eastern European origin. Hasidic music, liturgical chant embellished with heterophony mingle with modal ancient melodic lines reminiscent of Eastern European folk music. She is a composer who is constantly energised by sound and its inexhaustible possibilities." — Kate Romano (Artistic Director of Goldfield Ensemble)In the 1970s, Erika was actively involved with the Fires of London, the Nash Ensemble, Dartington, and the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM). Between 1974 and 1994 her works were regularly performed at London's South Bank Centre, at major festivals and were regularly broadcast in the UK and abroad, but then it all stopped...We are delighted to bring her music to a new audience on this first commercial album and have selected six chamber pieces spanning a 25 year period (1980-2005). […]
2019-06-26 06:36:00
Distinctive, uncompromising, theatrical: the music of Erika Fox revealed on the Goldfield Ensemble's Paths from NMC
[…] music on Composers Edition] Erika Fox Erika Fox was born in 1936 in Vienna, coming to London in 1939 as a refugee. She grew up in a Hasidic rabinical family where music, dancing, rituals and belief in miracles were part of daily life. Her childhood musical world included Hasidic chant and much music of Eastern European origins. She studied with Harrison Birtwistle and Jeremy Dale Roberts. In the 1970s she was involved with the Fires of London, the Nash Ensemble and Darlington with major performances right through to the mid-1990s.And then nothing. To a certain extent family intervened, but to fall off the map entirely is striking and puzzling.The disc includes a wide range of music from 1980 through to 2005, and what you notice at first listen is it distinctiveness, its striking sound world and its uncompromising nature. This is music which owes little to Western classical music, […]
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