Contemporary classical

Stravinsky’s The Firebird begins in darkness, and it might be the softest, deepest darkness in all music. Basses and cellos rock slowly, pianissimo, in their lowest register; using mutes to give the sound that added touch of velvet. Far beneath them rumbles the bass drum: a halo of blackness, perceptible only at the very edge of the senses. In Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, you felt your hairs tingle before you discerned a note. Seconds later, the very air within the hall seemed to be quivering with sensuous, engulfing bass warmth. You can be sure that Rattle anticipated that sensation; planned for

My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters and outline of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the early 1930s; she commissions him to write a piece and invites him to compose it at