There’s something absolutely right about the bringing together of Norway’s Only Connect – a festival that, as its name implies, encourages one to question (inter)connections between ostensibly disparate musics – with Tectonics, Ilan Volkov’s peripatetic festival the name of which evokes fundamental, underlying bedrocks that continually meet, connect and rupture. Taking place last week in the city of Stavanger, in the south-west of Norway, it’s only the second time the two festivals have conjoined, and the results were often appropriately volatile. That being said, one of the things that struck me powerfully during the festival – and this echoes my experience of Only Connect last year – was its almost complete lack of ostentation. The impacts it made were frequent and deep, but there was rarely an overt sense that this is what was actively being sought by the composers and performers. i’ve long felt that a certain kind of nonchalance – by which i mean the avoidance (or at least, the disguising) of obvious signs of audience direction or manipulation – is essential to the most powerful musical experiences, and at Only Connect that was its prevailing character, and i’ve no doubt this was a major factor in making those impacts as deep as they were. Read more
HCMF 2016: Seth Parker Woods, Ensemble Resonanz + Elliott Sharp + Gareth Davis
Friday at HCMF began with a recital by rising star cellist Seth Parker Woods. I’ve had the opportunity to see Woods play once before (at HCMF 2014) and the experience was a highly impressive one, so I was very much looking forward to seeing him in action again. He did not disappoint, performing four challenging works, two of which involved live electronics. The acoustic pieces occupied soundworlds of an intimate, ephemeral nature. Alvin Singleton‘s Argoru II was sufficiently gestural that it took on a pervasive arbitrariness that frustrated engagement on anything but the most superficial level. Gray Neon Life by Edward Hamel was similar but explored much more interesting alternations between gesture and pitch with occasional fragments of a barely audible spoken text. Nonetheless it, too, conveyed an aloofness that made its transient filigree feel somewhat skin-deep. Despite these compositional concerns, Wood’s performance of both pieces was seriously involving, exploiting the intimacy to give the impression he was playing to every member of the audience personally, and even at times as though he were playing entirely to himself. George Lewis‘ Not Alone utilised electronics to echo, distort, resonate, flitter and skitter around and follow hot on the heels of the cello’s material. Structured as a clear sequence of contrasting episodes, there was a delirious playfulness in Lewis’ conveyor belt of wildly diverse musical offerings. As with all but the very best works in the bloated performer-does-something-and-computer-responds genre, there were times when the hierarchical relationship felt simplistic, obvious and even a trifle tired, but this was a minor shortcoming in an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable and convincing piece. Read more
HCMF 2016: Arditti Quartet + Jennifer Walshe, Ensemble Musikfabrik + Peter Brötzmann
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
