Chris Swithinbank writes music.

As the year draws to a close, here’s a se­lec­tion of things from the last twelve months that I have en­joyed and would like to share. Have a happy 2013!

Dan Vezza’s Composer Conversations pod­cast has kept me listening with its utter candour and un­pre­ten­tious dis­cus­sion of com­pos­i­tional nitty-gritty since the first episode in September. Dan is not only able to steer good chat, but pos­sibly uniquely qual­i­fied to present com­posers from quite dis­tinct scenes, in­cluding com­posers from both Europe and America, with a wide variety of mu­sical voices.

Tanztheater Wuppertal, 1980 — Ein Stück von Pina Bausch — I was lucky enough to catch the re­vival of this Pina Bausch cho­reo­graphy at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris twice in the spring. The per­form­ance, which lasts al­most four hours, is an as­ton­ishing med­it­a­tion on loss and farewell with an in­tensity and breadth that com­pletely bowled me over.

Piaras Hoban, stamme : nahuskild : 존재감 — I met Piaras and heard this piece at Fondation Royaumont in September. There is some­thing won­der­fully bold and forceful in the way this work un­folds, let­ting sound slip into a kind of un­pre­dict­able, mys­tical dimension.

In a much briefer vein, here is Tim McCormack’s Apparatus vividly per­formed by young German en­semble hand werk at this year�������������s edi­tion of the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik.

Neil Luck, Fiona Bevan & ARCO, Last Wane Days — This two-track EP col­lab­or­a­tion between com­poser Luck and singer-songwriter Bevan around texts by Richard Foreman per­forms the kind of ADHD–evoking styl­istic leaps that one might ex­pect of Van Dyke Parks and yet somehow hangs to­gether with a weird, geeky co­he­sion. The music is linked to Luck’s ‘Notebook’ per­form­ance pro­ject, a video of which is also worth watching.

Old(er) things new to me

Novel

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Poetry

E.E. Cummings, ViVa

Film

Werner Herzog, Herz aus Glas

Music

Heinrich Schütz, Historia Der Auferstehung Jesu Christi, Ricercar Consort, Mark Padmore et al.

Mark Andre, iv 4, Ensemble Alternance

Robert Phillips, Mapuana mai kekahi (scent of an­other), The Nonsense Company

Previously…

Two thou­sand el­even & Two thou­sand ten.