On 21 October Wallace Halladay conducts the University of Toronto Contemporary Music Ensemble in the Canadian premiere of Matthew Hindson’s This Year’s Apocalypse. The 12-minute work appears alongside music by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Diana Soh, Magnus Lindberg, and Elena Kats-Chernin.
Scored for a chamber ensemble of 14 players, This Year’s Apocalypse takes up humanity’s preoccupation with the end of the world, whose threats – global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, nuclear war, terrorism, and SARS, to name just a few - seem to have multiplied in the public imagination throughout Hindson’s lifetime.
Some of these forces are turned into musical expressions by Hindson, making the numbers of nuclear weapons or victims of infectious diseases the basis of the work’s terrifying harmonies. However, the piece reflects on humanity’s capacity to persist despite fear and mass panic. A cadenza-like section in the middle of the piece for solo horn – a technical tour-de-force – represents in individual in the midst of all the ensuing chaos, gloom and doom, living their life and even experiencing human emotions, such as love, tenderness and compassion.
This Year’s Apocalypse was written for the Verbrugghen Ensemble at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, who premiered the piece in 2016, conducted by John Lynch – watch their performance here. The ensemble returned to the piece in 2018 and most recently on 19 September 2025, conducted by Sam Weller.