<< -- 2 -- Roderic Dunnett MUSSORGSKIAN GIANT
This month, just back from conducting the London Sinfonietta on its Swiss
residency in Basle, he conducts the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
-- till recently Sir Simon Rattle's fiefdom and now directed by Sakari Oramo
-- in three pretty mouth-watering concerts in Birmingham's Symphony Hall
and at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival : his own The Way
to Castle Yonder (an extract from Higglety Pigglety Pop!) and
Whitman Settings (with soprano Lisa Saffer); Berg's Three Fragments
from Wozzeck; and Bartók's suite The Miraculous Mandarin (substituted
at Huddersfield with the Gran Duo by the Finnish composer Magnus
Lindberg, currently being championed by the Sinfonietta).
Knussen's response to music has remained, he says, 'pretty much unchanged
since I was a kid : it's what I breathe. I can't imagine it not being there.'
He was a teenage celebrity at fifteen, having composed his first symphony,
in which he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra (of which his father,
Stuart Knussen, was the superb Principal Double Bassist in the Sixties;
his grandfather was principal cellist of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester).
'Nobody plays it now..' he says, 'and frankly I wouldn't want to hear it
played. It sounded a bit like a tonal American symphony written by a Russian
who knows his Britten. But I'm quite proud I had the tenacity to complete
a half-hour piece when I was fourteen ... because I find that very hard
now!'
With his commitment to the London Sinfonietta on top of everything else,
conducting, he says 'occupies a lot of my time these days. I still think
it's fundamentally my job as a conductor to do my contemporaries, so I tend
to concentrate my energies on twentieth century music, i.e. modern or contemporary
works -- rather than standard eighteenth and nineteenth century repertory,
which I see as outside my remit. And obviously I tend to give priority in
programming to music I care about as a composer.'
Continue >>
Copyright © 17 November 2001
Roderic Dunnett, Coventry, UK
KNUSSEN AND THE LONDON SINFONIETTA
THE FABER MUSIC KNUSSEN PAGE
THE HARRISON/PARROTT KNUSSEN PAGE
LISTEN TO DG 469 556-2
<< Music
& Vision home
Martin Lee-Browne >>
|