Audience Review - skittering sounds and Hendrix

Prior to Sunday’s concert I took the deliberate decision not to read any of New Dots’ selected blog posts on the subject of Crumb’s Black Angels (I’ve now read the posts, they’re great and can be found here). This decision was made in order to receive the music purely on its own terms, an opportunity I relished as a student who so often has analysed such a famous piece to death before seeing it performed. I’d previously seen the Ligeti Quartet perform in Sheffield and was very excited to see this fantastic quartet again. The venue, Hoxton Basement, worked well with the aesthetic of the concert and I was inspired to see such a diverse audience attending a classical music concert. The programme was well balanced and flowed fantastically between pieces, an aspect that often lacks in concerts featuring premieres and new works as composers are often piled in and programming neglected.

The concert opened with a world premiere of Anna Meredith’s Music for Ravens which developed from bird like skittering sounds into a Reich-esque rhythmic interplay. This was followed by William Dougherty’s The Aureole Effect receiving its second performance. Before the quartet began there was a brief discussion between Dougherty, Ji Sun Yang and a trustee of New Dots, as well as breaking up the music these conversational interludes gave the audience a fantastic insight into the music beyond the programme notes. The Aureole Effect made fantastic use of the orchestral power of the string quartet, featuring sweeping harmonics and beautiful moments of notes passing between players. Following this was Ji Sun Yang’s les accordéons V which again had been previously discussed. The quartet valiantly battled through this longer piece against the troubles of firstly an incredibly creaky chair and secondly a snapped string on the viola. The piece again harnessed the power of the quartet fantastically yet seemed to slightly outstay its welcome. Due to the snapped string the interval was brought forward by a piece.

Following the interval we heard Wadada Leo Smith’s Black Church part of a larger epic Ten Freedom Summers that the Quartet had previously performed as part of. This piece similarly to the preceding work seemed a little longer than necessary yet I felt that if heard as part of the huge epic that it was created for the piece would have been outstanding. The performances of both les accordéons V and Black Church were fantastic and it was certainly the musical content not the performers that could have been faulted. Following these works we moved the climax of the night: Crumb’s Black Angels and a new piece written in direct response to this classic. Tom Green’s Gravity Fragments managed masterfully to be clearly inspired by Black Angels yet at the same time had a clear musical identity of its own. It felt as though Crumb had been reimagined through the postmodern lens of a composer indebted to rock music and indeed my concert companion later described the piece as Hendrix-y.

Finally onto the Crumb which was everything it promised to be. A truly stunning performance despite another broken string (this time on the first violin). The quartet skilfully navigated the small stage and the sounds of amplified strings melded fantastically with that of the gongs and bowed glasses. In a larger space I’d have hoped for the glasses to also be amplified but in this case it wasn’t necessary. The quartet fully committed to all the performance and linguistic challenges that the piece threw up. The entire concert was amplified which I greatly enjoyed as even in the smaller space of Hoxton Basement it allowed the sound of delicate techniques and harmonics to ring out and the entirety of pieces to be fully enjoyed by the entire audience. Overall a fantastic concert performed by a masterful quartet, fully committed to the cause of new music and it was great to see it received so well.

Alex Gowan-Webster was at Hoxton Basement on 31st May 2015