Hear and Now: Two British Voices by Knussen, Wigglesworth, Od (2015/2015), Dirigent Ryan Wigglesworth, City Halls, Glasgow, United Kingdom

The first Hear and Now of the BBC SSO’s 15/16 season pairs two friends who are major voices in British contemporary music: Oliver Knussen and Ryan Wigglesworth. Glasgow-born Knussen’s music is famous for its jewel-like brightness, precision, and playfulness: Music for a Puppet Court spins variations on a16th century puzzle canon, using two small orchestras (and an alarm clock), while the whirling Flourish is an established orchestral favourite. Composer-conductor Ryan Wigglesworth dedicated his recent Violin Concerto to Knussen, a work which “manages to fulfil all the conventions of a classical concerto without succumbing to any of its clichés” (The Guardian). The BBC SSO’s Leader Laura Samuel is the soloist, while soprano Claire Booth sings both Wigglesworth’s Augenlieder - settings of poems by Robert Browning, Egon Schiele, Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman - and songs from Knussen’s opera Where The Wild Things Are, his celebrated version of Maurice Sendak’s famous children’s book.