Music festivals understandably like to start with a bang; the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival began with a WTF. And not just one but two of them, courtesy of Jennifer Walshe with the Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Musikfabrik with Peter Brötzmann. Their respective ‘WTF-ness’ was partly superficial, partly the stark nature of the collaborations, and partly a by-product of the tenacity of the composers with regard to their ideas, in both cases perhaps best described as ‘dogged’. Read more
