Sciarrino Rules the Waves! H&N, Sat, 10/6/17; 10:15pm

[Beef Oven!]

It's still available - yearly subscriptions £49 print, £30 digital, and individual monthly copies available at selected stockists (including the RFH):

https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/

I can't comment on the quality, I've not read it in years.

Thanks ferney.

Regarding quality, the last edition I read was excellent, so maybe I'll have a little look.

[Beef Oven!]

It's no surprise to me that the other works on last night's programme didn't make nearly as deep an impression - and it's no "shame" on the composers involved not to have produced a work that stands out when put in "the same" programme as a work by Sciarrino. For me, there was a diminuendo of interest with each work - I quite enjoyed and was intrigued by the first two works, but gradually lost interest as the time went on. I thought that the last piece was the sort of thing that - if Music Composition was taught in the same sort of way that Art is - would be produced in the folio of an "A"-level student who then went on to study Economics at University.

BUT - I think it's fantastic that The Assembly exists; that somebody has taken the initiative to show the wider(ish) audience that not all young composers in this country churn out safe, "crafted" work that sounds as if it had been written by a fifty-year-old Accountant wondering where their life went wrong. The sense of adventure ... of daring to try "daft" ideas ... the joyful willingness to "fail". All that was so much more important to me than the works' actual "failure" to conform to my own demands of a "successful" work. I hope to hear a lot more from this ensemble.

I thought it waned and I must admit I drifted away.