Everyday sounds evoked in a delightful and unusual concert
Classical Nonclassical Barbican, London EC2 ★★★★☆
Despite its name, Nonclassical has become an indispensable part of the classical music scene. Since it was founded in 2004 by Gabriel Prokofiev – grandson of the great 20th-century Russian composer – it’s provided a platform for young composers outside the classical mainstream by promoting concerts in unconventional spaces such as disused factories and clubs.
This Barbican date marked Nonclassical’s debut in a mainstream venue, and Prokofiev really seized the moment, presenting a lavish programme of no fewer than 14 new or recent pieces by composers from countries as varied as Morocco, Nigeria, China and the United States. Some were purely electronic; some mingled electronics and conventional instruments. What they all had in common was a “spirit of place”, evoked often in the most literal way through recordings of the sounds made in a particular place.
Among them was Christian Onyeji’s Ufie, Igbo Dance (III), in which the sounds of the main market of Ogbete in his native Nigeria formed a backing to his joyous dancing piano music. Alongside the gently pastoral piano piece D’un jardin clair by the tragically short-lived composer Lili Boulanger, we heard the sounds of the garden where she strolled more than a century ago. Both were played with ravishing subtlety of touch by Rebecca Omordia.
This intimate, homely feel would come as a surprise to anyone who associates electronic music with the chilly beeps and hums of sciencefiction soundtracks. As this concert showed, much electronic music these days is less concerned with utopian futures and more focused on the sounds of landscapes, or birdsong, or humdrum things like street chatter.
That being the case, shiny new digital technology was less favoured here, and obsolete gear was much in evidence. Kate Carr’s recordings of the deep vibrations emanating from the area around the Bricklayer’s Arms in Bermondsey was garlanded with noises from numerous small toys, bits of wire-wool and scrunchy paper bags. The Chinese-born, London-based “conceptual artist” Li Yilei accompanied their pre-made electronic piece, Boundary Conditions, with live performance on the theremin, an instrument invented in 1919 that is played by waving one’s hands in the magnetic field around the instrument. Their sinuous, mysteriously ritualised handflutterings were certainly eyecatching, though for my taste the piece was too self-absorbed in its own world of long-drawn-out drones and pulses.
That piece aside, everything was delightful and affecting in its own way, though the opener, A Return to Spatial Futures, performed by the four members of Langham Research Centre, stood aside from the overall atmosphere.
The images of 1970s brutalist architecture and the clangorous, beautiful modulated sound of the piano took us back to a more bracing time when the future seemed something one could believe in. For a moment, I felt quite nostalgic.
Watch this concert until 7.30pm today at barbican.org.uk