TEM 68 267 First-Performance 54..70

first performances 63

vastness of the universe’ that its composer symbolic claim. At the same time as the curators sensed when a boy, lying in his rooftop bed in (Aisha Orazbayeva, Sam Mackay, Igor the Punjab, looking up at the stars, but also Toronyi-Lalic and Lucy Railton, in collaboration incorporates his adult responses to the discover- with the commissioning body Bold Tendencies, ies of modern astronomy. Much of the music is based at the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park) very effective and captures something of the have effectively bypassed the establishment net- sense of scale that Sohal seeks to represent: he works and funding structures, they have set can build stately figures like massive temple out a clear alternative narrative about how con- chants, draw out evocative tendrils of melody temporary music may yet be practised and from oboe, flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, set understood. the brass striding forward purposively, even This narrative is not without precedent. The chance an evocation of the Leningrad Symphony ‘post-classical’ sensibility – and its attendant cura- by adding a side-drum to a brief tattoo; other torial philosophy – is already some decades old. passages feature orchestration of almost Many of the erstwhile initiatives that reacted Ravelian sensitivity. But it still doesn’t add up against the traditionally stuffy venues and rituals to much: there’s no underlying harmonic direc- of concert music have become, in time, as insu- tion, which affects his ability to suggest scale lar and exclusionary as the culture they originally (with this of all subjects), the thematic material protested. In painting reactionary caricatures of is over-exposed, the climaxes neither cathartic the classical and modernist establishments, and nor truly climactic – after only ten minutes its in appropriating signifiers of revolt (more often progress was predictable. It might make effective than not from popular culture), these move- film music but it didn’t sustain almost an hour of ments effectively concretised as the negative listening in the concert hall. image of what, in the first instance, was a rather An object lesson in how to deploy an orches- too convenient straw man. tra followed a month later, with the premiere, on While certain aspects of the post-classical atti- 4 September, of Anthony Payne’s orchestration tude were evident at the LCMF, the curatorial of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Four Last Songs, set- stance was both more subtle and more inclusive. tings from 1954–8 of poems by his wife, Ursula. In the choice of venue, in the way in which the The texts themselves are inconsequential, and festival sought to establish an audience, and in VW’s piano parts give little indication of the rich- the steering clear of the usual agencies and fund- ness to which they aspire. Payne puts his finger ing bodies, the curators positioned the festival at on Vaughan Williams’s late orchestral manner a step removed from the dominant institutions of with almost uncanny perception, transforming British classical and contemporary music. In the these brief miniatures (all four songs are over curation of the actual programmes, however, in twelve minutes) into extraordinarily evocative there was no notion of any kind of ideological minor tone poems, each containing an emotional imperative, no apparent bias towards any par- charge beyond its weight and extent. The BBC ticular idiom or genre, and no sense that deci- Symphony Orchestra responded to Osmo sions were informed by the need to Vänskä’s direction with unusual sensitivity, and communicate a ‘brand’. Rather, the decision- Jennifer Johnston’s stately, rich mezzo soprano making would seem to have been informed, is a voice that we will be hearing much more of. first and foremost, by a simple – but in these – Martin Anderson times apparently radical idea: the music should make a proposition. Each of the festival’s eleven events posed a more or less specific question, but ‘Bold Tendencies’: London Contemporary none offered an easy answer. And this was per- Music Festival, Peckham multi-storey car haps the most refreshing aspect of the LCMF: park, London, 25–28 July, 1–4 August 2013 music was allowed to be difficult. The opening night – To a New Definition of There is a certain audacity to four young cura- Opera – was emblematic of the propositional tors adopting the title ‘London Contemporary basis of the festival as a whole. A diverse collec- Music Festival’ for their first large-scale collective tion of pieces, connected more or less loosely to venture. For a festival that deliberately sets out the broad theme of opera, offered various points to sidestep the musical establishment, there’s of synthesis, but also various points of product- an aspect of calculated provocation in the appro- ive disjunction. The unique space of the priation of a title that would seem to be the pre- Peckham multi-storey car park was put to par- serve of that establishment. The gesture, ticularly imaginative use, with the audience however, goes some way further than staking a being led, over the course of the evening,

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through its various open areas, alcoves and hid- sinuous strands, noises, and snatches of melody. den theatres. The experience may have been clo- Charlemagne Palestine’s In the Strumming Style ser to that of medieval allegory than to the began with an oscillating two-note ostinato, the unfolding of an operatic narrative, but it none- piano resonances transformed via subtle altera- theless provided a clear sense of developing dra- tions of touch and dynamics, and a gradual matic structure to a programme that was in all filling-out of the harmonic space. The psychoa- other respects a bricolage. Excerpts from Philip coustic effects had a peculiarly tangible quality, Glass’ Einstein on the Beach bookended the shifting the listening awareness from the visceral event, with a sequence of beautifully charac- action of hammer on string, towards wave-like terised performances running in between: phasing patterns, operating across distinct and excerpts from Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, Laurie non-overlapping timescales and eventually Anderson’s United States, Jennifer Walshe’s Die towards an indistinct netherworld between har- Taktik, as well as complete performances of mony and timbre. Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments and Wagner’s The festival’s second weekend opened with an Wesendonck Lieder. Immersive Opera Double Bill. The audience shared The conceit behind the following evening’s the same provisional stage as the singers and concert – positioning the music of Helmut instrumentalists for two terse monodramas, Lachenmann against that of Ennio Morricone – Kate Whitley’s Roma and Gerald Barry’s La was perhaps less carefully considered. The pro- Plus Forte.ANew Complexity and Noise event on gramme booklet made the thinking behind the the following evening was effective in fore- juxtaposition clear: ‘it remains a fact: grounding connections between sets of impro- Morricone is Lachenmann’s favourite composer’. vised and fully notated music, at the same While Morricone’s early experimental music dis- time, thankfully, demonstrating that the denom- played many fascinating features (for example, inational monikers of the event’s title have little the patterned spatial motions within and practical utility when it comes to accounting for between instrumental groups, and textures that the experience of the actual music. It was the evolved from quasi-canonic exchanges of materi- improvised sets (by Steve Noble and Anthony als), there was no real sense that these features Pateras, in duo and solo configurations) that had been developed and integrated as part of a demonstrated a greater adaptability to the pecu- broader, individualised language. This aspect liarities and particularities of the acoustic space. may have been less conspicuously evident had Pateras’ short solo set for custom analogue syn- the programme not also included thesiser progressively moulded itself to the Lachenmann’s 30-minute solo piano work room, the slippery low-frequency glissandi fold- Serynade – played with an extraordinary range ing around and occasionally settling on resonant of timbral nuance and formal control by axial modes, setting into motion a range of inter- Roderick Chadwick – the full effect of which ference patterns and vertigo-inducing spatial left the Morricone pieces sounding distinctly effects. lightweight. The concert concluded with a spa- The piece to garner the most press and social tially conceived arrangement of the theme media attention over the course of the LCMF music to Once Upon a Time in America, which was Philip Corner’s Piano Activities – the work left one wondering whether it might, in fact, that closed the final concert (prosaically titled be the rather more compelling film music of Keyboard Breakdown). It was perhaps to be Morricone that makes him a favourite of expected, but still somewhat disappointing, that Lachenmann. the anticipation of witnessing the dismantling The final two days of the festival’s first week of a piano would narrow much of the collective were addressed to drones, avant rock, minimal- focus to the spectacle, and trigger a subsequent ism, and post-minimalism (all very broadly conversation that never managed to move defined). The Glenn Branca Ensemble presented beyond the immediate ‘anti-music’ gesture that the UK premiere of Twisting in Space; a progres- the piece would on first glance seem to be mak- sively shifting and intensively accumulating har- ing. (Ben Beaumont-Thomas’s review in The monic and textural mass of detuned guitars, Guardian on the day immediately following the bass and drums, saturated in fuzz and distortion. concert was exemplary in this respect – as abun- In Tony Conrad and Jennifer Walshe’s duo, Ma dant in moral outrage as it was entirely lacking in la Pert, an initially bare quasi-spectral drone critical engagement with any aspect of the work was slowly thickened and transformed by an other than the apparent provocation.) While the ever more animated overlaying of gestural activ- piece undoubtedly has an element of destructive ity, the drone eventually disintegrating into spectacle to it, the aspect that was more strongly

foregrounded – in a performance that was both note stated that ‘this forms the central “still- subtle and sensitive – was the tactile nature of point”’ in his pantomime of the same name. the sound itself, and its gradual transformation The note also drew an interesting parallel with through a series of overlapping but clearly differ- Mozart’s The Magic Flute, in that Krishna is entiated textural fields. The overall effect was always accompanied by eight flutes (including problematic in precisely the way that the best altos), and that the two lovers sing each other’s conceptually driven music can be: it was not names over and over (the entire text being a purely concept, nor purely spectacle, nor purely mere five lines) in much the same way as sound. Rather, it was the inseparability of these Papageno and Papagena do in the Mozart. This aspects that lent the experience its peculiar was represented in the opening nine minutes complexity. in alternating sections sung by tenor John Mark It is not uncommon for the narrative around Ainsley and soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, contemporary music to take on a gloomy tone: which were introduced and interspersed by the music is in crisis, composers and performers instrumental passages of (mainly) widely spaced have lost contact with their audiences, and so on. string triads. This music provided all the material But, what if the issue is not a crisis in contempor- for the work. The soprano writing was of par- ary music, but rather a crisis in contemporary ticular interest for its liberal deployment of mel- music curation? The LCMF says something to lifluous melisma and incredibly high tessitura for those who proclaim the (seemingly ever- much of the time. By way of a codetta to this imminent) demise of contemporary music, and opening section, the soloists eventually came bemoan its failure to connect with an audience. together in a unison passage accompanied by a In fact, it highlights the ways in which the monotone chant by a four-voice male chorus token gestures that have been directed towards with intermittent percussion. A brief recurrence an apparently finicky public – market-driven of the opening instrumental material in quicker logic, focus group decision-making, and a ‘con- tempo was succeeded by a more extended sec- temporary lite’ mentality – have made an entire- tion for the two voices, again with extended ly negligible impact on the attitudes of both melisma in an achingly sublime duet. A return actual and potential audiences. Why were the of the passage accompanied by chant, and open- 5,000 tickets to the LCMF snapped up within ing instrumental music in faster tempo, was two days of being made available? It certainly rounded off by an extended unison passage for helped that they were free. But the more key the soloists, then a quiet version of the instru- aspect was that the curators devised a pro- mental music as a coda to the 17-minute work. gramme that did not patronise its audience. In By contrast, the five lines of If Ye Love Me were doing so, they demonstrated that there remains set for a female choir of over 70 voices accom- a significant number of people prepared to panied by 16 strings, and lasted for only five min- engage with a broad and challenging curatorial utes. Appropriately enough, the Christian, proposition, and there remains a significant num- Hindu and Islamic names of God were intoned ber of people prepared to listen in new ways. by the multi-faith MIF Sacred Sounds Choir. Newton Armstrong The work began with low, slow-changing chords from sustained strings, which became higher and slightly more urgent as the piece developed. The John Tavener; Manchester International setting of the third line of the poem (taken from Festival 2013 traditional sources) proved the heart of the work, with the choral lines matched by ‘ecstatic’ trills This concert at the Bridgewater Hall, by the BBC from strings. A short string coda concluded the Philharmonic under conductor Tecwyn Evans, work. featured three world premieres commissioned It would be fair to say that the two works by MIF 2013 from the late John Tavener, described above would probably have con- together with Mahamatar from 2000 (featuring formed to the expectations of listeners who Sufi singer Abida Parveen, following a rare UK had attended this concert to hear serene, static, appearance the previous evening, and performed luminous music by the composer of The to a screening of Werner Herzog’s 2001 film Protecting Veil. The final piece in the programme, Pilgrimage) and his 1968 choral piece In Alium. however, offered a different perspective on The concert opened with ‘Love Duet’ from The Tavener’s work. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is Play of Krishna, on a text for the Hindu god based on one of Tolstoy’s final short stories Krishna and Radha, chief of the Gopis, or and deals with ‘a dying man’s excoriating physic- cow-herd girls. The composer’s programme al pain and his emotional and spiritual crisis’, and