The 840 concerts in London were part of the long-vanished pre-Covid world and one which I had thought was gone for good, so it was a welcome surprise to see it resurrected with minimal fanfare after a five-year-plus hiatus. Can one go home again? Not exactly, as the concert last Saturday had relocated from their once-regular Islington haunt to St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate. Otherwise, nothing seemed to have changed, with a programme that retained the same quietly reserved and very slightly precious mood that has become the series distinctive style. As usual, the instrumental forces were modest: works for two violinists and for piano duets. The gig began with the most prickly piece of the night, Marc Sabat’s Three Chorales for Harry Partch, a duet for retuned violin and viola. The earliest of his compositions, it draws on his career as a violinist and his study of microtonality to view Partch’s own use of microtonality under a microscope, creating a work of buzzing, vibrating slow-motion slewing, all subtones and doublestops. The two string players were Amalia Young and Anne Yin Han (apologies for not knowing which one played viola), who showed serious intent whether playing Sabat or arrangements of Diego Ortiz’s viol Recercades. The Ortiz pieces were interspersed through the night, having been arranged for violins by concert series curator Alex Nikiporenko. Co-curator Christian Drew indirectly echoed these pieces with his violin duet 17th Century Music, which struck me as a loose but airy collection of gestures toward the baroque era, minus the drive. (This is at least the second, possibly the third piece I’ve heard whose title riffs on Laurence Crane’s 20th Century Music – strange how influences can spread.) Darius Paymai’s sonnerie, air was another of the new pieces written for this concert and took a similar approach to Drew, this time giving Satie the languid treatment. The strongest of the new works was Nikiporenko’s Thread, an affecting violin duet that gained effect through taking intimate personal and sentimental inspiration to produce music that was securely woven together yet always translucent. The two pianists were Jay Austin Keys and Fernando Yada, who presented a suitably sensuous interpretation of Linda Catlin Smith’s Velvet which seemed to focus on the immediacy of touch ahead of overall shape, and a suitably dense version of Egidija Medekšaitė’s Textile 1 which reduced differentiation in the ever-changing small differences of interplay into a tight, seamless surface. The final work combined violins and pianos, James Creed’s Plain Song using sustained tones from an e-bow on the piano strings over which the musicians would sparingly add one or two notes to harmonise on the faint outline of a song.
Creed also began the evening’s music, earlier at St Mary At Hill, at a free matinee concert given by Music We’d Like To Hear as part of London’s Open House weekend. Some curious punters who attended were quietly bemused by the works presented, a typically eclectic mix combining rarefied sublimities and literal piles of junk. Creed’s piece Lomond was written about five years ago but used the same method of Plain Song, this time producing faint traces of Loch Lomond out of the piano strings’ resonance. This time, the concept behind the work seemed to hold the piece together better. The programme was curated by Laurence Crane (q.v.) and featured the “GSMD Experimental Music Workshop and guests”, including Tim Parkinson and Angharad Davies. A scene from Parkinson’s opera Time with People (written about here earlier) was presented, performers crouched over small piles of aforementioned rubbish and producing a surprisingly broad palette of sounds from them as they muttered stop-start in unison. It made the following performance of Pauline Oliveros’s Rock Piece sound strangely monochromatic by comparison. John Lely’s Symphony No. 3: The Parsons Code for Melodic Contour is a near-unison work of blunted melodic obstinacy; the occasional deviations out of tune should undermine its solidity but instead just make it seem more threatening. Conversely, a rerun of Amber Priestley’s woozy derive Did not feel very well at skool (31/1/1977) became insidious by its dissipation, with the musicians scattered around the hall brewing up a thin but ominous musical miasma.
