Latest on Forbes: James MacMillan In The Countryside

Contemporary Music Festival in Neuberg an der Mürz

…Usually it is chamber music that I seek when I make musical trips into the countryside… partly because Munich – if and when I am based there – is not a terribly good place for chamber music. When based in Vienna, the situation is not quite as dire, if only for the efforts of the Wiener Konzerthaus whose chamber music cycle(s) do all the heavy lifting and whose chamber music venues – the Mozart- and Schubert-Hall – are absolute jewels… acoustically and atmospherically better than the sarcophagus-like Brahms-Saal of the the Musikverein. There’s a bit of contemporary music going on in Vienna, too, but much of that either of the fig-leaf variety (done to satisfy the abstract notion that it should be done, but with little heart behind it) or in the damp prison cell of avant-garde niche-ism (“Wien Modern”, which has thus devolved). I’ve certainly never gone as far for a contemporary music festival as Neuberg an der Mürz – which is located somewhere between Vienna and the end of the world…

->James MacMillan In The Countryside