Thanks to the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, I have attended concerts featuring his Music on a number of occasions (IIRC, that "number" being precisely three) - my curiosity aroused by the enthusiasm for his work by others, many of whom have brought my attention to highly rewarding Music that I hadn't previously known about. Abrahamsen I find a very difficult nut to crack - the most vivid memory I have of it was a performance of Schnee ("Snow") in which I sat through the best part of an hour listening to an initially interesting idea that then stopped, and was repeated, and then stopped, and then repeated, and then stopped, and then ...
By about a third of the way through, I was quietly going spare. It was like sitting next to someone who'd just told you a moderately amusing joke, and then repeated the punchline, and dug me in the ribs and - thinking I hadn't got it - repeated it again and again. Not at all my sort of thing. But then last year his monodrama Let Me Tell You became a best-selling CD - a "modern classical" piece that didn't seek to "placate" a "wider audience" caught the attention and imaginations of exactly such an audience.
Anybody else have any more positive comments and/or recommendations to make about this composer?
By about a third of the way through, I was quietly going spare. It was like sitting next to someone who'd just told you a moderately amusing joke, and then repeated the punchline, and dug me in the ribs and - thinking I hadn't got it - repeated it again and again. Not at all my sort of thing. But then last year his monodrama Let Me Tell You became a best-selling CD - a "modern classical" piece that didn't seek to "placate" a "wider audience" caught the attention and imaginations of exactly such an audience.
Anybody else have any more positive comments and/or recommendations to make about this composer?
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