Numbed by the banal Nyman

Michael Nyman Band 40th Anniversary

Once a superbly incisive music critic but now long-established as a bestselling composer, Michael Nyman is surely right to be satisfied with his career switch. While he continues to churn the stuff out to feed lucrative film and record contracts, no reviewer anywhere has ever earned enough to be fairly compensated for having to sit through a Nyman concert.

This Barbican event celebrated the Michael Nyman Band’s 40th anniversary, and if measured in levels of artistic cynicism, little can be said to have changed over the years. It remains hard to spot the appeal of his meretricious music, amplified semi-pop that falls between every stool. His trademark cheap and cheerful style, based less than before on numbingly repetitive rhythms, though still dependent on progressions that make the common chord sound truly common, is as much pop music for people who don’t like pop as modern music for people scared of modernism.

Yet with works played here ranging from 1976 to 2013, some trends could be heard. Early pieces, such as Chasing

Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds and An Eye for Optical Theory, rely especially on neo-Baroque figuration and rippedoff elements of klezmer, mixing them to create a sort of hypnotic melancholy that would be more effective if it wasn’t so utterly and unrelentingly banal.

On hand to sing extracts from some more recent Nyman song cycles, Australian soprano Marie Angel also performed the early Bird List Song. She growled her way through much of the evening but warmed up on the endlessly repeated high ‘A’s in a song that might have appealed to ornithologists in the audience had a single word been audible – the Barbican’s acoustics are unfriendly to amplified music.

Coyly omitting his commercially successful score, The Piano, Nyman proved only that his musical outlook remains phoney and simplistic. His works addressing the Holocaust fail to heed Adorno’s warning on the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. If, in Nyman With a Movie Camera: End with Speed, the rhythmic energy of the music and the visuals did at least add up, he remains as shallow in his video work as in his music. Perhaps after 40 years, it is time for a reboot – or even a well-pensioned retirement.