In London, the new year almost invariably means new music. With many of the capital's classical venues given over to dance or panto, the week-long Park Lane Group Young Artists Series becomes an inevitable focus of interest. The aim is to present two concerts a night of young performers playing contemporary music. The programming is also adventurous, setting works by new composers alongside those of established figures.
Thus, the early concert on the opening night found the Gallimaufry Ensemble sandwiching Benjamin Wallfisch's Quintet for wind instruments between comparable works by Harrison Birtwistle and Elliott Carter. Wallfisch just about holds his own in such exalted company with a pointillistic piece in which an assertive solo horn first battles with, then tames, a gaggle of waspish, shrieking woodwind.
In some respects Wallfisch takes Birtwistle's Five Distances for Five Instruments as one of his points of reference. Birtwistle similarly focuses on the horn, which cues and anchors the freewheeling lines of the other players. Both works formed a fine showcase for the Gallimaufry's horn player Alexia Cammish, though the Birtwistle, which requires the musicians to be placed at considerable distance from each other, lost its clout on the cramped Purcell Room platform.
Carter's Quintet, meanwhile, was arrestingly performed, with every facet of its strenuous intellectualism unblinkingly explored.
The second concert was a ragbag recital given by violinist Harriet Mackenzie, pianist Christopher Glynn and bass clarinettist Sarah Watts. Watts, dressed in black PVC, bumped and ground her way through the London premiere of Marc Yeats's Vox, an overlong, shapeless sequence of effects, though she was at her best in Cornelius Cardew's Mountains, an eccentric, delirious amalgam of Bach and Chairman Mao.
The new work for Mackenzie and Glynn, meanwhile, was Irreconcilable Truths by the South African Robert Fokkens, an irresolute duel that alternates flaring violence with timeless limpidity. The duo came unstuck a bit in Louis Andriessen's Disco, not always negotiating its rhythmic exactitude with ease. Left to her own devices, Macken zie revealed a formidable technique in Adam Gorb's Klezmer. The piece leaps back over much 20th-century music and finds its twin roots in the rhapsodies of Liszt and traditional Jewish violin playing. You feel it should perhaps be classified at times as folk rather than classical, although it is a knockout from start to finish.
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