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, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 04 Oct 2021 at 15:07:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298213001393 64 tempo 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