On May 7, London’s Barbican Centre presents the BBC Symphony in the UK premiere of Michael Gordon’s Rewriting Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Commissioned by the Beethoven-Bonn Festival and premiered by the Bamberger Symphoniker in 2006, Gordon’s remarkable re-imagining filters one of the classics of the classics through the lens of the 21st-century. Not looking to improve on the work’s timeless quality, but to imagine ‘what if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?’

Gordon writes:

Read more…Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me…

At the Barbican Centre in London, on March 20, 2012, the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiere Field Recordings — with new works by Gordon, Lang and Wolfe. The evening-length project that is as much a mystery as a concert – a kind of ghost story. The ghosts aren’t the physical presence of people gone before, but they are the ghosts of sounds, images, ideas, and voices. Each composer has been asked to find and interact with something recorded before, using the power of music made right in front of us to reach out to other things not present…