Of the larger-scale performances at HCMF 2025, the most qualitatively challenged was that given by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson. Laurence Osborn‘s Mute just sounded like early ’90s Thomas Adès, pointlessly rehashed three decades later, also demonstrating how the Faberian sound is not so much alive and (for want of a better word) well as, in this case, reanimated. Marta Śniady‘s How Can I Help You? was a classic demonstration of ‘show, don’t tell’, when the opposite would have worked so much better; Luis Fernando Amaya‘s Mi libro es la Tierra: Rosa Ixchel, suffered even more in this respect, its musical aspect effectively redundant (and, in any case, never interesting) beside the spoken texts that were the work’s real raison d’être.
Solastalgia by Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (which i explored in my 2022 Lent Series) was highly effective, Patterson establishing a liminal duality, sometimes suggesting voluntary confinement but increasingly sounding as if it had been involuntarily imposed from outside. The London Sinfonietta was like an imprisoned group of players railing, Buñuel-like, against invisible walls around them, in a psychological extension of what we heard in Alethia. When They Grow their Leaves, a première from Estonian Liisa Hirsch, had a curious implied physicality, as if the work’s assorted pitches were vibrating along unseen strings that were being stretched and relaxed in real time. The levels of tension varied, but it was all tension, and in a similar way to Solastalgia one sensed an inner urge to articulate something vital, kept enigmatically unclear within its unstable soundworld.
The highlight of this concert was Paweł Malinowski‘s floating: disappearance, receiving the first UK performance of its ‘b’ version for sinfonietta. Here, too, the music occupied a place seemingly restful and relaxed but riddled with anxiety. Notes didn’t so much sustain as hang uncertainly, hovering with unclear intent, their pitches having their true voice and colour hidden or muffled behind mutes. This was not so much a musical refuge as music in need of refuge, delicate, moving not merely gingerly but seemingly painfully. Yet this plaintive atmosphere wasn’t washed out or wan, and though obscured had an implied richness to it. It spoke like a refracted melody, or as if encoded through a cypher, emerging as something one step removed yet with clear emotional resonance. It was genuinely amazing, its slow progression coming to feel absolutely momentous.
Two large-scale concerts were similarly outstanding. One came from HCMF regular Christian Marclay, in the UK première of Constellation, performed by ONCEIM (aka ‘Orchestra of New Creations, Experiments and Improvised Music’). At first it seemed like a stream of consciousness, though with emphasis on the consciousness: whimsical but deliberate, careful, organised. From the equivalent of warm-up exercises, mass in- and exhalations, the performance moved through assorted episodes that seamlessly dovetailed. Group textures, shifting harmonic colours, aesthetic and stylistic nods, including an avant-jazz sax solo wonderfully foreshadowed by huge rolling bass waves. It diminished into muted intimacy, focusing on breathing again, and expanded into a more stratified world where diverse elements spoke simultaneously. It felt easier to follow the music at a local rather than global level – perhaps the composer’s intention – making the overall evolution of the piece more surprising and impressive. Its final falling back to breathing again was both satisfyingly expected yet also indicative of a music that could continue indefinitely.
The other came on the opening night, Motor Tapes by Sarah Hennies, performed by Dedalus Ensemble. Cross rhythms are fun, right? (5:4, anyone?) They certainly were in Hennies’ hour-long study derived from neuroscientific studies of mental activity. To a large extent this was music to listen through rather than to, in this way gaining a better perspective of its intricate internal workings. Multiple simultaneous tempi predominated, yet Hennies expanded this with granular episodes resulting from vibration and friction, and later, introducing more and more elements rooted in pitch. One become aware in a new way of the basic continuum of vibration: slow, alone = pulse; fast, alone = pitch; slow, together = rhythm; fast, together = noise.
As in the works by Rytis Mažulis and Bryn Harrison performed in the previous concert (discussed in Part 1), memory and (ir)resolution played a part here. Chordal material suggested something being dredged from dark recesses of remembrance, either placed within this huge mechanical apparatus or an unexpected (miraculous?) appearance resulting from its complex interlocking actions. Elsewhere the work begged the question as to whether Dedalus Ensemble was united or merely a group of adjacent individuals. Yet both the moments and periods of coalescence and coordination indicated a fundamental connection, everyone engaged in the same multifaceted endeavour, one that ended rather beautifully, like an antique squeeze box caught in a perpetual cadence.
