In a week of flash floods, the world premiere of Houses Slide was all too timely. Who doesn’t currently feel they might be atop a crumbling cliff, metaphorical or otherwise. The composer Laura Bowler and librettist Cordelia Lynn have created a work for soprano and ensemble on eco catastrophe. A woman, overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, finds a way to take positive action. Directed and conceived by Katie Mitchell and conducted by Sian Edwards, Houses Slide was powered by 16 bicycles: an off-grid world-first that sounds crazy, and nearly was, but couldn’t have been more serious.

Out of the darkness, a whirr of pedals set the piece in motion, created by volunteer cyclists on adapted bikes at the back of the Festival Hall stage (all credit to the technical team that made it happen, and to the riders, who had to keep going for 90 minutes). Eventually a few lights flickered on, illuminating the conductor’s and musicians’ stands, as well as powering a control desk – which only goes to show how many spinning classes it would take to light up the whole Southbank Centre.

The London Sinfonietta, who commissioned the piece, then joined in. Tapping and clicking, blowing or breathing into their instruments, their sounds gradually turned to music, at once impressionistic and honed, meticulous, multilayered. A swirl of taped voices (using submissions from the public) catalogued loss and change, in insect and bird life, weather, landscape, remembered since childhood. The phenomenal Australian actor-soprano Jessica Aszodi, cycling throughout, was the pivot.

With so much sensory activity, bicycles ever active in the shadows, I didn’t take in the full narrative: subtitles (needing more energy) would have helped, though the overarching shape was clear and unforgettable. Bowler, no stranger to big subjects, is working on an opera, The Blue Woman, for the Royal Opera’s Linbury theatre next year, about violence against women. Katie Mitchell, in an aftershow discussion, said she was doing more pedal-powered work in Berlin, and a production of The Cherry Orchard from the point of view of the trees, which may or may not have been a joke. It was an evening that made you think, even if the lasting impression was, above all, of the slender power of all those bikes.

The Manchester Collective, performing at Spitalfields music festival, were nearly felled by Covid. Despite a last-minute change of personnel – you would never have known – they performed a richly diverse programme, devised by the composer Edmund Finnis, of music for string quartet. Finnis has collaborated frequently with the collective, notably in his haunting The Centre Is Everywhere (2019) for 12 players. Alongside Philip Glass (String Quartet No 2, “Company”) and Stravinsky (Three Pieces for String Quartet), Finnis chose the exuberant You Belong to Me (2016) by Mica Levi, his fellow student in Guildhall days and now, among other things, a film composer. Levi turns simple triads and trills into new worlds of sound, with the upper three instruments flying freely over the grounded, often explosive cello.

Finnis’s own String Quartet No 2 was given its world premiere, a finely balanced work in four short movements that uses all the timbres and mysterious overtones of four strings, four instruments without hurry or urgency, and with minimal use of vibrato. The slow dialogue between the instruments had the meditative feel of 17th-century English consort music by Lawes or Purcell. Or that’s how it seemed on first hearing. I might think quite differently on a second encounter with this bewitching work, which I hope will be soon.

Wigmore Hall was full to socially distanced capacity for the Elias String Quartet playing Haydn’s Quartet Op 64, No 6, expressive and playful, and Mendelssohn’s A minor Quartet, variously elfin, heartfelt and wild (broadcast live on Radio 3 and available on BBC Sounds). They ended with a persuasive arrangement, by the Elias’s second violinist, Donald Grant, of the Scottish folk song I’m Asleep, Don’t Wake Me – not, on this occasion, addressed to the fully alert audience at Wigmore Hall.

Star ratings (out of five)
Houses Slide ★★★★
Manchester Collective x Edmund Finnis ★★★★
Elias String Quartet ★★★★