★★★★☆
After last year’s online event, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is back in the flesh, and it began with a concert ticking all those new music boxes that people either love or love to mock. Post-industrial setting? Check. Inordinate number of microphones? Oh yes. A stage that looks like a wired-up jumble sale? Here was a textbook example.
A thicket of blue wires sprouted from numerous everyday(ish) objects spread out on the podium in the Bates Mill Blending Shed. Biscuit tins, food cans, recorders gaffer-taped to hairdryers, giant orange cardboard tubes — these and dozens more items were modified, mechanised and connected to computers to form a household orchestra, duetting with the Explore Ensemble’s more traditional acoustic line-up.
At times the curiosity value outweighed the musical impact of this logistical extravaganza, set up for Mauro Lanza and Andrea Valle’s Systema Naturae, a stamina-testing 85-minute cycle of bitesize movements inspired by medieval bestiaries, herbaria and lapidaries, which recorded species of animals, plants and stones. Yet, whatever my reservations, there was something undeniably fascinating about its detailed snapshots of beeping, tapping, clicking, whirring and whooshing.
Over at Huddersfield Town Hall, Red Note Ensemble, fluently conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, found itself on less-experimental ground. All three pieces interested; none followed through on its initial promise. Aileen Sweeney’s The Land Under the Wave had an appealing quality, while Luke Styles’s Five Phase Sphere was stubbornly abstract. James Dillon’s EMBLEMATA: Carnival made the strongest impact. The house lights dropped to darkness, electronics added atmosphere and a gong was used to mesmerising effect.
Dillon has enjoyed a long association with Huddersfield, but this year’s composer-in-residence was Chaya Czernowin. Her 2020 work The Fabrication of Light closed an explosive concert by Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Enno Poppe. The Israeli-American composer’s piece spirals for 60 minutes, somehow drawing us inside the fabric of the music. It’s knotty stuff, but with a sense of ritual, the natural world, and wit. Even the moment when the percussionists played tap-dancing shoes with their hands didn’t feel like a gimmick.
Yet of the six pieces I heard over two days, one stood above the rest. Poppe’s Prozession (2020) is a remarkable work, surging with volcanic energy. “This performance will be loud,” warned the sign on the door of St Paul’s Hall. And it was. Building in waves from near-silence, a finger-tip patter of percussion, a brush of the violin, the music reached pinnacles with trumpets blaring, electric organs raging, drums demanding our attention. The four percussionists, placed at the corners of Ensemble Musikfabrik, were the music’s lifeblood. Poppe’s Prozession has to be experienced to be believed.
Parts of the Red Note Ensemble concert will be broadcast on November 27, and parts of Ensemble Musikfabrik on December 4, both on Radio 3
