A piece of music for 111 honking and whistling cyclists: it can only be the surreal world of Mauricio Kagel, this year's featured composer at the Aldeburgh festival. The massed performers of Eine Brise (A Breeze) made a serene, eerie passage through the crowds along the front of Aldeburgh beach.
Stranger even than this "fleeting action" were the other recent Kagel pieces in the festival. The weirdness of his Doppelsextett, performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and conducted by Sakari Oramo, is its apparent conventionality. Earlier in his career, Kagel composed pieces that turned performers into sportsmen and instruments into props, but all traces of theatre are eschewed in this piece, scored for six winds and six strings, in an attempt, Kagel says, to create "an organic musical form". The music is a dense, weighty argument, made from gritty themes and terse, hollow sounds, and climaxes in a section that mires the instruments in sticky multiphonics, scratches and scrapes. The strangeness of this music is its unpredictability: this is an impure kind of organicism.
The Composers Ensemble's Portrait concert of Kagel, conducted by Richard Baker, revealed the different worlds of two pieces from his Compass Rose cycle. Westen (West) climaxed with the percussionist hacking into a log with an axe, showering the Jubilee Hall stage with a confetti of woodchips. What was impressive about this performance was the way these physical gestures were integrated into the musical argument. Each contributed to the strange drama of the piece, and the allusions to jazz, palm-court salon music, and African drumming, made a rich commentary on "the west", and its relationship with other cultures.
But while Kagel's music invites interpretation, it also resists it. Norden (North) may have been a profound exploration of Arctic cultures, but in the Composers Ensemble's performance, it was also a compelling, sensual experience, with rumbling bass notes, whistling harmonics and an important percussion part for the leafy bough of a tree.
There was no mistaking the narrative of Ein Brief (A Letter), an expressionist psychodrama for soprano and orchestra, with Pamela Helen Stephen and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Oramo. Using only two words, "My love", Kagel creates a drama of loss and tragedy, as the woman reads terrible news in her letter. The music, with its innocent melodies poisoned by acid microtones, realises the woman's psychological torment: an image of directness and distance, embodying the ambiguity of Kagel's recent music.
