Nasty, brutish and brilliant

If you take awards seriously (which of course you shouldn’t) you could argue that Rebecca Saunders is now Britain’s most important living composer. Last week she won music’s Nobel, the Ernst von Siemens prize. €250,000. And its record is pretty good — if you ignore 1974 (Britten) and 1987 (Bernstein).

There are many reasons to love Saunders. Her post-concert talk was terrifically cheering. Explaining why she rarely writes vocal compositions, she told us blithely that it was because she ‘didn’t have anything to say’: ‘I don’t want my works to mean anything.’ Quite right. Meaning should be to music what shame is to Theresa May. A distant and hazy thing. At the South Bank’s slightly basic festival of new music, SoundState, those composers who had lots to say ended up saying very, very little — and vice versa.

Saunders is a perfect example. She is a kind of musical Sarah Kane, full of threat and thuggery.