Over the weekend, longtime Noise friend Will Robin, soon to take up a professorship in musicology at the University of Maryland, organized a second Symphomania marathon on WQXR's Q2 — a channel that recently won a well-deserved Peabody award for Nadia Sirota's show Meet the Composer. Symphomania, as I noted in a New Yorker web piece last year, is dedicated to the proposition that twenty-first-century composers are writing major works for orchestra that symphony orchestras ought to be playing far more than they do. The 2016 edition was even more diverse and absorbing than last year's. The composers ranged from celebrated European figures such as Wolfgang Rihm and Kaija Saariaho to younger Americans like Andrew Norman and Ashley Fure. A transatlantic flight caused me to miss a good portion of the program, but I'm planning to catch up during an imminent rebroadcast (begins Tuesday at midnight). I did hear the powerhouse ending, which moved from Peter Maxwell Davies's noble, oratoriolike Symphony No. 10 to Rebecca Saunders's transfixingly eerie miniata — a glimpse of its electric-guitar part appears above — and on to a series of works of decreasing duration: Liza Lim's The Guest, Nina Young's Agnosco Veteris, Julia Adolphe's Dark Sand, Sifting Light, Valentin Silvestrov's Abschiedsserenade, and Peter Ablinger's Drei minuten. That sequence speaks volumes about the range and power of the music of our time.
