Flights of fancy at the UK’S most radical festival
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
The UK’S best known showcase for cutting-edge music has been reduced from 10 days to five this year, thanks to practical difficulties following the pandemic. But it’s full of creative energy, and the venues have been hearteningly full.
Alongside the big set-piece events with well-known new music ensembles such as the London Sinfonietta, the festival has offered multimedia shows, audio-visual installations and an intriguing final day of “shorts”: three two-hour concerts that showcased new work for just one or two performers.
This implies an intimate focus on musicians communing with their instrument with no complicating distractions, and the performances in the early-afternoon show were indeed like that. Heather Roche, billed as “one of the world’s leading experimental clarinetists” – who ever knew there were such things? – produced some entrancingly soft, gleaming sounds, which seemed to emanate from the walls of St Paul’s Hall (though her foot pedal was a sign that some discreet electronic trickery was at work).
As with the other performances, the sounds themselves were so intriguing they absorbed all one’s attention – or it may have been that the pieces didn’t have a strong enough personality to do so. Only one or two seemed more than a frame for the sounds they contained, such as Larry Goves’s Borneo Rivers 2, in which wispy gestures eventually took on a real musical shape.
At the polar opposite to this simplicity was the later show, which reminded us that nowadays a solo performer can command more variety of sound than an orchestra, thanks to digital sound-enhancing technology. And not just sound. In Matthew Grouses’s Left Right, Left Right, a mordant commentary on the alienation produced by lockdown, percussionist Sam Wilson’s drums were hooked up to devices that played spoken words in time with his drum beats. Every now and then, he even popped up on a screen above the concert platform, to tell us about his lockdown woes. It was hectic but over-stuffed with incident, so the total effect was muted.
More rewarding musically was the set from pianist Zubin Kanga, in which spacey, clangorous sounds obtained by electronically distorting a piano were often laid alongside familiar musical gestures, including (in Laurence Osborn’s Absorber) processions of guileless common chords, sullied gradually by foreign notes – a fascinating effect.
After a while, one became aware that all the pieces tended either towards an intoxicated revelling in sound, or a focus on tiny repeated gestures – or a swinging back and forth between the two. The results were intriguing and sometimes even moving but not wholly satisfying – with one exception.
Laurence Crane’s Natural World, a setting of dispassionate lists of facts about birds and seashores culled from, among other things, The Observer’s Book of Birds, rose majestically above the uncertainty around it. Soprano Juliet Fraser’s gentle phrases were beautifully framed in the musical equivalent of stained-glass windows, painted in luminous phrases by Mark Knoop on piano and electronic keyboards. It made one realise that patiently observing the world is an act of reverence in itself.