New Year, New Music: Portraits of Classical Music’s Next Generation

Let me be the millionth (and final?!) person to wish you a very Happy New Year. 

2026 will surely be filled with music, and certainly anniversaries: celebrating their 100th birthdays will be György Kurtág (19th February) and Betsy Jolas (5th August), while we also remember 150 years since the birth of Manuel de Falla (23rd November). Meanwhile, plenty of American ensembles will mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence; the Philadelphia Orchestra perform works it originally introduced to America, from The Rite of Spring to Sibelius’s Fifth, while in Washington D.C. the National Symphony Orchestra welcomes banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck for a unique take on the NYC-inspired Rhapsody in Blue. This year, we’re going to need several cakes and many candles…

A new year means plenty of new music, too: Stephen McNeff’s Trumpet Concerto will get its world premiere with Jonathan Clarke and the Aalborg Symphony in February; Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood will enjoy its first-ever airing at the Bavarian State Opera in May; while in the UK, the London Philharmonic alone presents NINE premieres this season!

With new music comes opportunities for fresh young voices to be heard. As a teenage composer, I worried that the label ‘young’ – often added before ‘composer’ in descriptions of me – could imply a lack of quality, a suspicion or condescension. We are a world obsessed with age and youth. But as our next portraits prove, ‘young’ equates to no reduction in quality or ambition; here are three exciting composers who each provide a different sense of what ‘modern’ classical music can mean…

Dani Howard

I first met Dani when we were both asked to mark a big birthday for Classic FM back in 2017; when that radio station turned 25, they selected a small group of composers younger than the station itself to write them a ‘happy birthday’ piece. Within our contributions, both Dani and I opted for musical quotations that would doff the cap to a station that had done so much to bring classical music to the widest number; I wrote for brass at London’s Barbican Hall, including a central section that became an increasingly hectic potpourri of popular classical melodies from Brahms Hungarian Dances to Beethoven’s Ode To Joy (and Happy Birthday, naturally…). Dani’s scintillatingly rhythmic Argentum was penned for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and included subtle quotations of Handel’s Zadok the Priest: a nod to the first piece broadcast on Classic FM. Argentum (which you can see on below conducted by Michael Seal) was Howard’s first work for a professional orchestra, and so perhaps unsurprisingly it’s filled with an infectious excitement and energy; little wonder why it has since enjoyed over thirty performances globally. This fired the starting gun on a growing global career…

That Liverpool ensemble has since premiered Howard’s Trombone Concerto with soloist (and London Symphony Orchestra Principal) Peter Moore; they then recorded this for her debut orchestral album (released in 2024). Commissioned in 2020, by then this was her third collaboration with the RLPO and her largest piece yet. It was sparked by ‘the simple acts of kindness during the pandemic’ and proved equally inspiring: it won a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and was hailed by The Times as ‘an instant classic’. 

Now in her thirties, Howard has written a Percussion Concerto for Dame Evelyn Glennie; was the 2024 Resident Artist for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (which saw 260 teenage musicians perform one of her pieces at the BBC Proms); and this season, there are performances of her Saxophone Concerto written for Jess Gillam and the Bournemouth Symphony and Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestras.

Writing music of bouncing colour and vitality, it’s perhaps no surprise to learn Howard is synaesthetic, saying she ‘sees music in shapes’; perhaps it is this visual thinking that helps her music leap off the page!

Alma Deutscher

When people mention Alma Deutscher, they mention Mozart. Just this Christmas, the 20-year-old contributed to a BBC Radio 4 chat about the new Amadeus TV series on Sky, while Stephen Fry skyrocketed her online presence when pointing to the parallel over a decade ago. 

Superficial biographical similarities first, then: like Mozart, Deutscher was certainly a child prodigy. She wrote her first piano sonata aged five, a short opera by seven, a violin concerto at nine (which she later played at Carnegie Hall) and a piano concerto by twelve. Perhaps chief among the global headlines was her first full-length opera Cinderella, written between the ages of eight and twelve; it was performed in Israel in 2015 and travelled to Vienna under conductor Zubin Mehta within a year. You can watch the 2017 English language premiere in San Jose here directed by Brad Dalton and conducted by Jane Glover. A musical backdrop provided a neat reworking of the familiar fairy-tale; here, Cinderella is a gifted youthful composer, the prince a dreamy young poet, while the evil stepmother is a faded and jaded opera diva. In Alma’s work as in her life, then, music is everywhere.

Stylistically, there are Mozartian parallels when you sample Deutscher’s debut album, ‘From My Book of Melodies’ (Sony Classical, 2019); this piano collection presents a melody from each year of her life between four and fourteen, a sort of sonic diary. One of the pieces, Up in the Sky, was written aged seven and became the opening aria of Cinderella. Indeed, there is a singing lyricism throughout that reminds us both of her love of theatre, and the violin – Deutscher’s other instrument. Aside from this, her ‘sound’ offers restraint, clarity and transparency; ‘naïvety’ sounds like a criticism, but perhaps ‘purity’ is a better description. Its world is not a million miles from the Classical Era and indeed Vienna, a place she has called home since 2018; after all, it was the music of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven that provided her childhood soundtrack.

Deutscher’s world is one of rich imagination; in a childhood reminiscent of JRR Tolkien, she created an imaginary country, language and even composers that then inspired the pieces she wrote down in a book that she always carried. Each imaginary composer had their own style, which led to distinct languages in her own compositions (meanwhile, I had a childhood imaginary friend called Roger who, when I decided to become an adult, was sadly killed by a scorpion. Clearly, I missed a trick.)

Throughout her career, Deutscher has been outspoken about the need for melody and tonal harmony. Over the last century, contemporary classical music has been linked increasingly with complexity, harshness and the abstract; some have argued this is because, with global wars and increased media visibility, the world is a harsh place and so music must match it. But to Deutscher, inspiringly, she has challenged this. To her, music should be beautiful and such beauty is primarily carried by a singable melody. She argues that modern music should not shy away from pleasing an audience; this doesn’t make it cynical or commercial, or sacrifice artistic quality or relevance, but merely recognises a perspective that Mozart himself stated long ago: ‘Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.’

Tsotne Zedginidze

Meet another prodigy, but on the other end of the stylistic spectrum. Here, dissonance is common, alongside fragmentary phrases and leaps across the piano; this is music of tension, drama and shimmering beauty.  

Born in 2009, Georgian-born Zedginidze was taught by his piano professor grandmother from the age of five and began composing within a year having discovered a love of 20th and 21st century music. Opera was a particular draw, with Zedginidze playing through vocal scores of Berg’s Lulu and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle; this gives a hint as to his own at-times thorny and multi-layered compositional voice. 

Zedginidze has championed such composers as concert pianist, too; he gave his first recital in 2019, bringing Berg, Shostakovich, Janáček and Bach to Tbilisi, and within months was opening the Georgian National Philharmonic’s concert season as the soloist in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 2. Appropriately enough, that concert was dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Since then, he has had masterclasses with Boris Berezovsky and Rena Shereshevskaya, collaborated with Lisa Batiashvili and Simon Rattle, and had no less than Daniel Barenboim state that ‘Mozart is back… [and] from Georgia’. 

Tsotne entered his teenage years appearing at the 2022 and 2023 Verbier Festival, availablehere. Listen to the scintillating textures he creates in his original Dedication To Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel (above), with its repeated mid-range monotone interrupted by impressionistic flourishes across the piano; soon, a left hand melody provides neat counterpoint to a repeating circular figure up high. It is music of glittering beauty and staggering virtuosity – evidenced by the fact he follows such a piece with Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit! Now sixteen, he returns to Verbier this summer with a world premiere for his Piano Quintet and a unique Rencontres Inédites also featuring Mischa Maisky and Marc Bouchkov. 

So, if we didn’t suspect it already or had started to doubt… the future has much to look forward to!