“Almost all the music which mercilessly surrounds us today has the same underlying structure: never-ending gabbiness. What’s the difference between MTV music and most of the classical avant-garde? They use different material, but they’re both intensively talkative. For me, the true avant-garde is the critical analysis or issue-taking with our cultural surroundings – I want to know about the lull in the storm.” Radu Malfatti Sept 2001

Radu is one of the great, humbly confrontational figures in European music. His compositions and improvisations strip music to a bare minimum, striving constantly to discover the exact point at which sound resonates the clearest amidst long drawn out silences: to place notes, or clusters of notes, with great care into a calm and ordered hush, drawing you in, asking you to concentrate, to listen. Indeed, isn’t the act of listening inseparable from making sound; Radu allows you to hear each sound event for what it is. We have commissioned Radu to write a new piece for and to be performed by the 21-piece string section of the Northern Sinfonia: it is a world premiere and his largest scale commission to date.

A review of the performance.