Where the familiar and the strange join hands
Contemporary Music Festival Huddersfield
Like a hothouse in a botanical garden, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival nurtures the most exotic blooms in the garden of contemporary music. Saturday night offered a particularly
choice specimen. In an old cotton mill, German avant-garde group Zeitkratzer played arrangements of pieces by Seventies pioneers of electronic pop, Kraftwerk. So, we were listening to an acoustic recreation made in 2016 of pop made in 1970 by musicians who wanted to be electronic avant-gardists.
Confused? I certainly was, especially in Harmonika when three string players lofted a guileless major chord higher and higher. For a dizzying moment we seemed to drift into the prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin. Still, the string pizzicatos and twittering bird sounds of Wellenlänge cast a dreamy spell, and in Ruckzuck this bunch of instrumentalists, plus some discreet electronics, made a good stab at evoking a proper heavy rock back-beat.
Intriguing though it was, that the musicians had to be helped out by electronics did make me wonder what the point was. Much more satisfying was elsewhere in the festival, where the electronics were used alongside instruments in a genuinely creative way. The best was James Dillon’s fascinating Tanz/haus, sensitively performed by Red Note Ensemble. This unfolded with unhurried magnificence, with passages of agitation or keening expressivity from the instruments rising from the slow surge around them.
The previous day, Eve Egoyan’s performance of music by Linda Catlin Smith, the US composer, showed how much richness lurks in the oldfashioned piano recital. In Nocturnes and Chorales, gently furled chords which came close to Debussy were offset with a tolled note that seemed to come from miles away. The familiar and the strange joined hands, in a beautiful and unsettling way.
Hear the Kraftwerk concert for 30 days on BBC iplayer and other music from the Huddersfield Festival on Nov 25 and Dec 2, 9, 16 on BBC Radio 3; bbc.co.uk/radio3