This year's Huddersfield contemporary music festival proves that modern music still has the power to shock. A performance of Morton Feldman's The King of Denmark, in which percussionist Simon Limbrick used a massive array of instruments to produce a series of almost inaudible sounds, was greeted with a forlorn cry of "I haven't heard nowt yet" from one section of the audience. Limbrick's fastidious performance revealed that Feldman's music remains quietly radical. But the first weekend focused mainly on Denmark's king of composers: 70-year-old Per Norgard.
Norgard's music is stylistically unclassifiable. A piece such as Night-Symphonies, Day Breaks, performed by the Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen and conductor Reinbert de Leeuw, contains minimalist riffs, romantic string lines and intense violence. The piece propels itself through an astonishing variety of gestures and emotions - yet the unpredictable journey is utterly compelling. Instead of mimicking the sounds of nature, the piece translates the imagery of night and day into musical processes of acceleration and decay. Listening to it is like trailing in the wake of Norgard's explosive imagination: somehow, you are always catching up with the music's unstoppable, unstable flow of ideas.
Secret Melody, a solo violin piece brilliantly performed by David Alberman, turns this idea into a poetic point. The music seems on the verge of finding a simple melody, but it never settles. The end of the work, a fragile, haunting tune, is evanescent and ambiguous, and the music's secret remains just out of reach.
Even more revealing was pianist Rolf Hind's performance of the Concerto in Due Tempi with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. The piece, composed in 1994-5, is one of the richest and most complex concertos in the repertoire. Composed, as the title has it,"in two tempi", the piece pits the pianist against the orchestra, who play at a different speed. The effect was thrillingly vertiginous: as Hind's piano part collided with the orchestra, he seemed to pull them into the orbit of his music, only to be subsumed in his turn. Yet the most striking passage of the whole piece was Hind's blistering low-register cadenza, accompanied by four metronomes, all ticking at different speeds.
There were other significant premieres on the BBCSSO's programme: Stuart MacRae's granite-hewn Ancrene Wisse and Joe Duddell's accessible but verbose Not Waving But Drowning. But the energy and abundance of the concerto was unforgettable, and made a fitting climax to the festival's celebration of Norgard's music.
