Daniel Kidane News
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2024-03-23
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2024-03-18 14:54:15
‘Fiat Lux’ brought vivid imagery to the Barbican while ‘Aloud’ made a gritty statement at the Royal Festival Hall
2023-10-11 09:29:00
One of the 2022 Voices of Black Opera, Thando Mjandana, premieres a Daniel Kidane work with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
South African tenor Thando Mjandana won the Samuel Coleridge Taylor Award at the Voice of Black Opera competition in Birmingham in 2022 [see my article] and there is a chance to hear Mjandana in action back in Birmingham later this month when he joins Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) and conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni for the world premiere of Daniel Kidane's Cradle Song (setting text by Blake) on 18 October 2023 at The Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham, and the programme is repeated in Bristol on 29 October.Entitled Songs at Day, Songs at Night, the concert also features soprano Mimi Doulton, and features Daniel Kidane's Primitive Blaze, the UK premiere of Julian Anderson's Mitternachtslied (setting texts by Nietsche and Longfellow), the world premiere of Anderson's Thus, and music by Harrison Birtwistle.Kidane's Cradle Song is one of BCMG's Sound Investment scheme commissions, as was Harrison Birtwistle's 2018 work, … when falling asleep which is included in the programme.Full details from […]
2022-07-29 09:16:00
A contemporary take on Bach: his Orgelbüchlein, completed by contemporary composers, receives its UK premiere
Bach's title page to the Orgelbüchlein Bach began his Orgelbüchlein whilst he was organist at the ducal court of Weimar. The plan was for 164 chorale preludes covering the entire church's year, but Bach only completed 46 of them, yet he tantalised posterity by listing the titles of all 164 preludes. The Orgelbüchlein project has invited contemporary composers to complete the work. Over more than a decade, project director and organist William Whitehead has commissioned contemporary composers such as John Rutter, Judith Bingham, Sir Stephen Hough, Sally Beamish, Louis Andriessen, Daniel Kidane, Roxanna Panufnik and Nico Muhly to fill in these missing pieces and rise to the project’s central challenge: if Bach were alive today, how might he go about writing a short chorale prelude in the Orgelbüchlein style? The result is a new and complete Orgelbüchlein for the 21st century, a collection of 164 short chorale preludes containing a fascinating cross-section of contemporary European styles, […]
2022-04-04 07:51:02
The 2022 Edinburgh International Festival celebrates the festival's 75th birthday, the final programme by artistic director Fergus Linehan and a return to a full programme in indoor spaces
[…] his festival debut. With his Czech orchestra Bychkov will be exploring repertoire with Czech links, pairing Martinů's Concerto for two pianos (with the Labèque sisters) with Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, and also performing Mahler's Symphony No. 7, a work which the orchestra premiered in Prague (in 1908, with the composer conducting). Susanna Mälkki conducts the Helsinki Philharmonic, both conductor and orchestra making their festival debuts. Whilst the London Philharmonic Orchestra will be bringing a new Daniel Kidane piece. Zubin Mehta, making his first festival appearance since 1980, conducts the Australian World Orchestra in Berg, Debussy and Dvorak. The festival had been talking to conductor Francois Xavier Roth for some time, and he is bringing his orchestra Les Siècles with what has become their signature work, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, paired with Lili Boulanger's cantata Faust et Hélène. This latter, a work that Les Siècles has not performed before, was written the same […]