Most festivals go out of their way these days to jam-pack their weekends with all the best stuff, and that was certainly case at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. There was so much to enjoy during the opening weekend it felt as if it lasted longer than just a couple of days.
Explore Ensemble got the festival started with a superb performance of two very well-matched electroacoustic works. The first, Rytis Mažulis‘ Canon Mensurabilis (the world première of its revised version) had a curious sense of ‘non-speed’, maybe slow, possibly fast, probably neither. It matched perfectly the artwork for this year’s festival: like looking at something blurred, washed out, partially erased, a harmonic bokeh connected by remnants of rhythmic unity. It was lovely enough in this respect, speaking as an elusive, tantalising entity, hinting at a possible something we couldn’t resolve, yet it was also charming on its own terms, abstract sound forms moving according to their own internal architecture.
They followed this with another première, The spectre…is always already a figure of that which is to come by Bryn Harrison. This wasn’t so much blurred as fleeting, the music beyond our grasp from the moment we heard it. The material had a fascinating unclarity, feathered and fibrillated, the pitches wholly unstable. Here, the unresolvable allusions were like assorted fragments of past and future, memory and foresight. There was a distinctly obsessive quality to the way the music lingered at length on particular cells and phrases, cycling round and round as if attempting to discover, remember or simply create meaning. Extending this, making it feel uncanny, was the relationship between live and played-back sounds, the latter of which was machine-like, like an AI trying to learn and reproduce the ensemble’s actions. Yet it was also playful, locked in a surreal dreamworld where things were at once tangible yet incoherent, like being able to hold something in your hand yet ununable to fathom what it looks or feels like. It was a marvellous display of fugitive music, one that in its closing moments seemed finally to meld the sounds from instruments and speakers into a new, electroacoustic hybrid.
Another effective pairing came on Saturday night, featuring performances from Poland’s Martyna Basta and Aleksandra Słyż. This was the second part of HCMF’s Polish collaboration ‘Across the North Sea’, the first part of which i experienced a couple of weeks earlier in Kraków (including a fabulous set from Mariam Rezaei). Basta gave a performance that felt much more cogent and compelling than comes across in her recordings. Softly bowed notes, motes of voice, tinkling glass, all of these and other sounds looped and merged in a delicate, fragrant potpourri. It was like spellcasting; now the addition of some pizzicati, a little more bow and a lot more voice, and something rich and heady surrounded us. Much of the music gave the impression of being suspended in liquid, or perhaps aether would be a better description for the invisible medium that seemed to give bouyancy to Basta’s post-song creations.
Often her voice was splintered, expanded into choruses of fragments, contrasting with more focused sung lines that brought ethereal focus to the whole, made strangely touching during one autotuned sequence. Rotating bass figurations and slow tempi also gave the music a solemn flavour, perhaps the most effective example of which was Podszepnik II, with which she concluded her performance. Like an outtake from the score to Panos Cosmatos’ film Mandy, we entered deeply into dark, foreboding but beautiful territory. It had the intensity of a rite, tones looming, formations of overlapping echoes circling overhead, like the invoked response to some ancient magick.
Słyż’s performance was an excellent demonstration of gradual intensification. Assorted gong and tam-tam strikes resounded in Bates Mill Photographic Studio, their halting but steady repetitions processed and (re)coloured, responded to by noise, like waves crashing but as if they were solid. Over time, impact, resonance and noise overlapped, intersected, complicated, by now more textural and complex, and more than once giving the impression of time-stretch, the horizontal axis rendered pure elastic. Słyż seemed to be pulling at that elastic, revealing more intricacies of detail lurking within.
There were times when it might have become dronal – which one might have expected given Słyż’s fondness for them – but she pulled it away. Singing overtones were like loud cries from somewhere high above, perhaps in response to each deep impact. The soundworld intensified, becoming richer, splashier, almost caustic, seeming to give off white heat. It was all the more exhilarating considering where we had come from: those huge opening clangs, which persisted for some time, were the austere introduction to music that fluoresced and eventually blazed with warmth and colour.
Another multicoloured concert came from The Carice Singers, who gave a programme of Baltic and Finnish music. Their varied programme ranged from the benign – Lotta Wennäkoski‘s mellifluous, too short Valossa – to the malignant, Arvo Pärt‘s insufferable Sarah was Ninety Years Old, 25 minutes that either sounds like the most banal collection of sketches or the obsessed ravings of a mental patient. Pärt’s The Beatitudes fared better, working as it does in a similar way to John Tavener’s The Lamb, its patterns cycling round, abstract and expressive at the same time, the organ pedals sometimes arbitrary, sometimes reinforcing. The performance was an ideal slow burn, turning incandescent at its apex.
Most telling were the two works where emotion could be felt, perhaps all the more palpably due to being expressed in such a low-key manner. Žibuoklė Martinaitytė‘s Aletheia sounded rather simpler – perhaps more direct – in attitude than the recording i wrote about earlier this year. Even though the piece has no obvious words, there was a prevailing sense that words wanted to come, needed to be expressed. But ultimately, it remained a music beyond words, lament mingled with drone in mutual support, composure kept until a climactic breaking point. The sotto voce aftermath rang very true, plangent and painful with a touch of exhaustion. Likewise Joel Järventausta‘s There will come soft rains, a soundworld of equal parts indifference and resignation, like a poignant, heartfelt anthem sung before the end of humanity’s existence, a sad but fond farewell to a world that will continue, no doubt much healthier, without us.
