As I think I said in an email to you after Shorts day, I’d spent a lot of it reflecting that, throughout my (admittedly somewhat limited) exposure to the festival’s pieces this year, I was relieved not to have encountered much that was truly awful, but simultaneously underwhelmed by the majority of what I’d heard.
Two pieces blew that “meh” feeling out of the water, and made me view all the others in a less favourable light by comparison. One was the Ebizie, which suited the Town Hall interior so magically well that one almost imagined it had conceived as one of those site-specific “for x forces and concert hall”-type works. But even that was eclipsed by the Matthew Grouse, one of the most shattering evocations of a mind unravelling almost in real time (right down to that presumably deliberately ridiculous costume-change!) that I’ve ever experienced. Feel free to disagree!
But then again, Shorts 2 really was a concert of “gleaming nuggets of gold and steaming piles of crap” contrasts, wasn’t it? In particular, ZK’s seemingly still-shaky quality control when it comes to choice of what to play definitely placed most of his performance in the latter category, for my money.
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As I think I said in an email to you after Shorts day, I’d spent a lot of it reflecting that, throughout my (admittedly somewhat limited) exposure to the festival’s pieces this year, I was relieved not to have encountered much that was truly awful, but simultaneously underwhelmed by the majority of what I’d heard.
Two pieces blew that “meh” feeling out of the water, and made me view all the others in a less favourable light by comparison. One was the Ebizie, which suited the Town Hall interior so magically well that one almost imagined it had conceived as one of those site-specific “for x forces and concert hall”-type works. But even that was eclipsed by the Matthew Grouse, one of the most shattering evocations of a mind unravelling almost in real time (right down to that presumably deliberately ridiculous costume-change!) that I’ve ever experienced. Feel free to disagree!
But then again, Shorts 2 really was a concert of “gleaming nuggets of gold and steaming piles of crap” contrasts, wasn’t it? In particular, ZK’s seemingly still-shaky quality control when it comes to choice of what to play definitely placed most of his performance in the latter category, for my money.