“Narrow Sea”, by Caroline Shaw. The American composer Caroline Shaw (Greenville, North Carolina, 1982) was in 2013, at the age of thirty, the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, for her a cappella piece Partita for eight voices. My full review of her new album, Narrow Sea, can…

“All”, by Yann Tiersen. The French composer and pianist has been living for some time now in a place located precisely “out of time”: the island of Ouessant, twenty kilometres off the mainland coast of the French region of Brittany, a rock with an adverse climate and scarcely inhabited (barely…

“Doctor Atomic”, by John Adams. John Adams is, after Philip Glass, the great operatic figure of American minimalism. In both cases, however, the minimalism of their origins has been left behind, and both explore musical terrains that are no less complex, but more expansive. The 2005 Doctor Atomic, a work…

“Landfall”, by Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet. Can you believe it? Laurie Anderson, the grand dame of the New York (i.e. international) artistic-musical avant-garde, at seventy years of age, had not yet worked with the Kronos Quartet, the legendary group created by David Harrington in 1973 to spread contemporary music…

“SERIES OF ANDS. Immediate givens”, by Wim Mertens. The Belgian composer and pianist Wim Mertens emerged in the eighties as the most popular voice in continental Europe in the field of the minimalist current of contemporary music (Glass, Reich, Nyman…) With the passage of time he has not managed to…

“Homeland”, by Laurie Anderson. Nine years have passed since her previous work, Life on a String, but the truth is that Homeland, the show of which the album that summarises it is now being released, has been travelling around the world for three long years. In fact, it was the…