WNMD 2025 · OPENING CONCERT

"The opening concert of the ISCM World New Music Days 2025 features works for voice and orchestra, with soprano Camila Mandillo performing alongside the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, conducted by Pedro Neves. The programme with voice includes Lonely Child (1980), a deeply lyrical and introspective piece for soprano and orchestra by Canadian composer Claude Vivier, and Mysteries of the Macabre, a work that brings together three arias – veering between sarcasm and absurdity – from György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, in an arrangement by Elgar Howarth. Additionally, the programme presents three 21st-century works: Unerasing (2018) by young South Korean composer Jinwook Jung, nominated for the ISCM Young Composers Award, a piece that musically reflects on the erasure of colonial history and, through its title, proposes an “un-erasing” that exposes the colonial violence nationalisms seek to obscure. Greeting, a serene and luminous work by Portuguese composer João Madureira, conceived as…