LONDON — The London Sinfonietta doesn’t do nostalgia: As a group largely devoted to music so new that it arrives with the ink still wet, its business is the present, not the past. But that can be a problem when you’ve been around for half a century and want to celebrate. Do you look fondly back, or resolutely forward?
The Sinfonietta is doing both as it rolls out a special season for its 50th anniversary this year. The programs take in music that now counts as “classic,” by composers the ensemble has embraced across the decades: Berio, Henze, Ligeti, Stockhausen. But there are also premieres from figures of our own time: Hans Abrahamsen, Tansy Davies, Philip Venables. And the focus is a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on Jan. 24, 50 years from the day of the Sinfonietta’s debut.
According to Nicholas Snowman, a Sinfonietta co-founder, that concert “drew massive interest, because what we offered was unique.”
“These days, almost everybody plays contemporary music to some extent,” Mr. Snowman said. “But 1968 was a different world, where new work got shunted into the sidings.” The pieces that were performed, he said, were often “done badly, without enough preparation.”